Grok, a chatbot powered by artificial intelligence, will be made available to all Premium members of X this week, according to Elon Musk

Elon Musk, the owner of xAI, announced on Tuesday that the business formerly known as Twitter will soon make the Grok chatbot available to additional paying members, in response to the company’s decision earlier in March to make its Grok big language model open source. Musk said in a post on X that Grok will now be available to all Premium users this week, not only those on the more expensive Premium+ plan.

The change may indicate an intention to take on more direct competition from other well-known chatbots, such as Claude from Anthropic or ChatGPT from OpenAI. However, it can also mean that X is trying to increase its subscriber base. The news comes at a time when research shows that the X platform is struggling to keep its user base and that fewer people use it. X usage in the United States was down 23% since Musk’s acquisition and down 18% year over year as of February, according to new data from Sensor Tower that was revealed by NBC News.

Sensor Tower discovered that 75 out of the top 100 U.S. advertisers on X from October 2022 no longer spent ad budget on the platform, suggesting that Musk’s battle on advertisers may have also harmed the company’s income prospects.

Providing X users with access to an AI chatbot could discourage them from switching to other platforms, such as Instagram’s Threads or the decentralized platforms Mastodon and Bluesky, which grew quickly to reach over 130 million monthly users as of the fourth quarter of 2023 thanks to Meta’s resources.

Musk just stated that Grok “would be enabled” for all Premium subscribers “later this week,” without saying when it would be made available to X users.

The company’s mid-tier subscription, X Premium, costs $8 a month (online) or $84 annually. Grok was previously exclusively available to Premium+ members, costing an important $168 annually or $16 per month.

Given that it may respond to queries regarding topics that other AI chatbots usually stay away from, such as conspiracies or more contentious political concepts, Grok’s chatbot would be of interest to Musk’s supporters and active X users. It will also respond to queries with what Musk has called “a rebellious streak.” Most importantly, compared to rivals, Grok has access to real-time X data.

Naturally, if X is losing users, the value of that data under Musk’s control might be decreasing.