Telegram and Elon Musk’s AI firm xAI have agreed to a one-year partnership that will see Grok rolled out across the messaging platform.

Grok is a free generative AI assistant designed by xAI, with the company describing its aim as “maximising truth and objectivity”. The platform offers real-time search, image generation, and trend analysis.

As part of the agreement, Telegram chief executive Pavel Durov said that the company will receive $300 million in cash and equity from xAI and 50 per cent of revenue from xAI subscriptions sold via Telegram.

On Wednesday, he posted on X: “Together, we win!”

With the move, Telegram users currently numbering more than one billion will have access to the conversional AI assistant developed by xAI.

Grok can access real-time information through the web and social media platform X able to answer to “spicy” questions typically rejected by most other AI systems, xAI said in a statement.

The deal mirrors a similar rollout of Meta’s new optional AI tool on WhatsApp.

Hanna Kahlert, media analyst at Midia Research said that the move reflects a trend whereby “social and AI are trying to absorb each other,” a pattern that doesn’t necessarily reflect customer demands.

"Users primarily still use social platforms to talk to their friends, and see their friends' updates," she said.

According to the media expert, incorporating AI into messaging apps might result in people not trusting the platform.

In April, Meta’s new AI optional service on WhatsApp left some users frustrated because they were unable remove it from the app.

Telegram, which has around 950 million active users, made headlines earlier in the year when its chief executive Pavel Durov was detained in Paris. Prosecutors claimed the platform had failed to take action against harmful and criminal content on the site, including child sexual abuse imagery.

In December last year, the messaging app joined the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) to combat the sharing of child sexual abuse imagery online.

In December 2024, Elon Musk’s xAI raised $6 billion in equity financing.

A report by CNBC at the time said that the capital injection brough the valuation of the firm at more than $50 billion.

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