Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company xAI is looking for software engineers who can help build interactive AI avatars that resemble anime characters, and it’s willing to pay big money for it.

AI released two AI "companions" on its Grok platform, a Japanese anime girl named "Ani" and an animated red panda called "Rudi."

Elon Musk's xAI is hiring engineers at up to $440K to develop anime-style AI avatars for Grok, some of which have sparked backlash for their behavior.

Elon Musk's xAI startup is swimming in controversy after launching Grok 4, the latest version of its snarky AI chatbot. Last week, the company boasted that Grok 4 achieved higher scores than quite a few other large language models (LLMs) on various industry benchmarks.

AI explained why Grok 4 seemed to search for Elon Musk's opinions when asked about some hot-button topics.

Elon Musk’s company xAI apologized after Grok posted hate speech and extremist content, blaming a code update and pledging new safeguards to prevent future incidents.

People who pay for access to SuperGrok can now try the AI chatbot’s new “Companions” avatars, xAI owner Elon Musk announced Monday morning. The companions available currently include Ani, an anime avatar, and Rudy, a cartoony red panda.

The Department of Defense under Secretary Pete Hegseth has been fixated on buzzwords like “warfighting” and “warfighters,” and adopting new AI tools is part of that mission, according to leaders at the agency. And Monday’s press release was filled to the brim with similarly grandiose language.