Telegram founder Pavel Durov on Wednesday announced that the Dubai-based messaging service will make unspecified Grok models from Elon Musk’s xAI available to users.
“This summer, Telegram users will gain access to the best AI technology on the market. @elonmusk and I have agreed to a 1-year partnership to bring xAI’s @grok to our billion+ users and integrate it across all Telegram apps,” Durov wrote in a post on Musk’s social media service.
“This also strengthens Telegram’s financial position: we will receive $300M in cash and equity from xAI, plus 50 percent of the revenue from xAI subscriptions sold via Telegram.”
Telegram, according to a 2024 report from The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), is commonly used by Russian authorities and proxies for influence operations. Community of Democracies, an intergovernmental coalition of states, published a related report in January that explores the use of Telegram and also of Musk’s X for foreign information manipulation and interference.
Durov followed his announcement by offering reassurance about privacy. “User privacy is paramount,” he said. “To be clear, xAI will only access data that Telegram users explicitly share with Grok through direct interactions. That’s expected — you can’t message anyone (including a chatbot) without sharing what you write.”
Telegram’s privacy commitment has been the focus of some debate. Though Telegram offers optional encryption, Matthew Green, cryptographer and associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, observed last year that it’s not encrypted end-to-end by default. The biz also said it would start sharing certain information like IP addresses with authorities last September, shortly after Durov’s arrest in France.
Durov, a citizen of Russia, France, and the United Arab Emirates, was arrested last August in France by local authorities, in conjunction with government allegations [PDF] that Telegram has failed to take sufficient action to halt drug trafficking, cyber bullying, organized crime, and distribution of child sexual abuse material on its platform, among other claims.
The messaging biz billionaire was released on bail for €5 million shortly after his arrest. He is said to be in Paris and to be required to report regularly to the police while he awaits trial, which isn’t expected to happen this year.
Last week, Durov was denied the right to travel from France to the US for investment negotiations.
Telegram did not immediately respond to a request to say whether those negotiations involved xAI.
xAI’s Grok made news earlier this month when it started spouting conspiracy theories about White genocide in South Africa and questioned the Holocaust death toll. The later gaffe at least has been attributed to a programming error that has since been corrected.
Unmoved by the controversy, Microsoft last week added the Grok 3 family to the list of models available through its Azure cloud platform.
The latest Grok model (Grok-3-Preview-02-24) scores well on the HuggingFace leaderboard, which lets users vote on how effective each model is at certain tasks. It currently sits in eighth place overall. ®