xAI has created a frontier model with Grok 4, and it now seems to be looking for partnerships to take it to the public at scale.
Elon Musk has said that he hopes that xAI and Apple will work together. An X user had speculated that Apple would buy Anthropic, the company behind the Claude series of models. Another replied: “They will end up working with xAI. It’s the better option”. Musk seemed to agree with this sentiment, and replied, “I hope so!”.
It could make sense for Apple and xAI to partner up. Apple already has a partnership with Google through which it integrates Google Search on Apple devices. This partnership exists because Google has a product that’s far superior to anything else in search, and is only too happy to pay Apple an estimated $20 billion a year to be the default search engine. But there are several competing AI models of roughly equal capabilities, and Apple now can choose who it partners with.
Apple likely considers Google too much of an equal and a rival to partner with it in AI as well, and it would likely not be its first choice. Apple has the option of going with OpenAI. OpenAI has the most popular models which are also very capable, and it could be a natural fit for Apple. But OpenAI has made its ambitions in the hardware space clear, and has partnered with former Apple designer Jony Ive to create an AI-first hardware device. This device could likely pit it directly against Apple, and Apple could potentially not want to rely on OpenAI’s models in that situation. Like the original poster had said, Apple could partner with Anthropic, but Anthropic’s models are best known for their coding and business use-cases, and Apple is primarily a consumer company.
That leaves xAI. With Grok4, xAI has created a model that’s beaten OpenAI and Google on many benchmarks. xAI also doesn’t seem to yet have any ambitions in the customer hardware space, and wouldn’t pose a threat to Apple in that regard. Also, xAI is a relatively smaller company, and Apple could be able to extract favourable terms in a deal compared to the others.
xAI too could stand to benefit from the partnership. Grok has powerful models, but has little or no public visibility outside of X, and xAI also doesn’t have the distribution heft of Google or OpenAI. Integrating with Apple could take Grok to the masses, while giving it a massive new customer that can help boost its revenues.
A partnership might not be entirely straightforward though. Elon Musk has said that he wants to create a maximally truth-seeking AI, and Grok is the least politically correct model frontier model by far. Apple is a conservative company and would want to protect its reputation at all costs, so it wouldn’t want to be embroiled in any controversies Grok might create. It remains to be seen if the partnership between Apple and xAI actually fructifies, but with Musk himself saying that he hopes a deal will go through, there are clearly some moves happening behind the scenes to get the two companies together.