Musk Admits xAI Trained Grok on OpenAI Models

Elon Musk testified in a California federal court that xAI used distillation techniques on OpenAI models to train Grok, calling it a general industry practice. When pressed for a direct answer, he confirmed it was partly true. The admission came during his ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman over the company's shift to a for-profit structure. Distillation involves systematically prompting AI models to replicate their capabilities at lower cost, threatening the competitive advantage of frontier labs. Musk also ranked AI leaders during testimony, placing Anthropic first, followed by OpenAI and Google, while describing xAI as a much smaller operation.