xAI, Elon Musk’s generative artificial-intelligence company, put Michael Nicolls in charge this spring to speed development of its chatbot Grok and close the gap with Anthropic’s Claude.
Nicolls set a direct benchmark, writing: "Our near-term goals are to match performance of Claude" and that the job was to "make Grok maximally useful," he said in a memo to staff, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.
Musk merged xAI into SpaceX earlier this year, rebranding the unit SpaceXAI and folding it into the rocket-maker to supply resources and provide another way to attract Wall Street investors.
The merger prompted dozens of departures, including many of xAI’s co-founders, and daily operations inside the AI team became chaotic, according to interviews with a dozen people familiar with the company.
Internal project documents and multiple Slack channels named Claude directly, signalling a strategy focused on product parity with Anthropic rather than a separately articulated technical identity.
The account draws on conversations with current and former staffers and internal documents and communications.
