Musk has long railed against what he sees as heavy-handed censorship. And he’s promoted Grok’s more explicit versions.
In August, he posted that “spicy mode” has helped new technologies in the past, like VHS, succeed.
According to one source with knowledge of the situation at xAI, Musk has “been unhappy about over-censoring” on Grok “for a long time.” A second source with knowledge of the situation at X said staffers consistently raised concerns internally and to Musk about overall inappropriate content created by Grok.
At one meeting in recent weeks before the latest controversy erupted, Musk held a meeting with xAI staffers from various teams where he “was really unhappy” over restrictions on Grok’s Imagine image and video generator, the first source with knowledge of the situation at xAI said.
Around the time of the meeting with Musk, three xAI staffers who had worked on the company’s already small safety team publicly announced on X that they were leaving the company – Vincent Stark, head of product safety; Norman Mu, who led the post-training and reasoning safety team; and Alex Chen, who led personality and model behavior post training.
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/01/08/tech/elon-musk-xai-digital-undressing
Elon is actually trying to stop Grok from censoring contents, but it's the other xAI members who keep wanting more censorship...