Elon Musk confirmed on Sunday via X that xAI will open-source its Grok 3 artificial intelligence model. He responded “Yes” to a question about making Grok 3 openly available.
The confirmation fulfills a pledge Musk made in August 2025, when xAI released the older Grok 2.5 model on Hugging Face. Musk stated then that Grok 3 would follow in about six months, pointing to a release around February 2026. xAI follows a pattern of open-sourcing previous-generation models after newer versions stabilize, as with Grok 1 in 2024.
The announcement follows xAI’s release of its Grok-powered recommendation algorithm for the X platform on GitHub in late January. This algorithm determines content in users’ feeds.
xAI unveiled Grok 3 in February 2025. The company trained it using approximately 200,000 GPUs at its Memphis data center. Musk described Grok 3 as “an order of magnitude more capable” than its predecessor. The model powers features on X and competes with products from OpenAI and Google.
The open-source commitment coincides with a financing deal. Apollo Global Management is nearing completion of a $3.4 billion loan to buy NVIDIA chips for lease to xAI. Valor Equity Partners is arranging the transaction, which could close as early as this week. This is Apollo’s second such investment in xAI-linked chip-leasing vehicles, after a $3.5 billion loan in November.
Less than a week before Musk’s confirmation, he announced that SpaceX acquired xAI. The deal values xAI at $250 billion and SpaceX at $1 trillion.
xAI faces several regulatory challenges. The European Commission extended data-retention orders through 2026 under the Digital Services Act. These require X to preserve internal documents on its algorithms.
In the United States, 37 state attorneys general started coordinated legal action against xAI over content-moderation issues. California regulators ordered xAI to address problems with its image-generation features.
xAI released its recommendation algorithm and plans to open-source Grok 3 publicly. This approach contrasts with strategies at competitors such as Anthropic and OpenAI.
