Feb 13 (Reuters) - Grok, Elon Musk's AI chatbot, has been gaining ground in the U.S. over the past months, data showed, even as it draws global censure and regulatory scrutiny after being used to generate a wave of non-consensual sexualized images of women and minors.
U.S. market share of the tool rose to 17.8% last month from 14% in December, and 1.9% in January 2025, according to data from research firm Apptopia.
The increase bodes well for money-losing xAI, the Musk-owned startup behind Grok, which was launched about three years ago and has been spending aggressively to scale the infrastructure needed to stay competitive in Silicon Valley's artificial intelligence race.
It comes ahead of an initial public offering of Musk's space firm SpaceX that bought xAI earlier this month to consolidate his empire, and is meant to power his ambitions of putting AI datacenters in orbit.
The deal valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion, Reuters has reported.
The jump firmed Grok - built into Musk's X social media platform - as the third most-used chatbot in the country in January behind market leader OpenAI's ChatGPT and second-placed Google Gemini, according to Apptopia data.
ChatGPT's share slumped to 52.9% last month from 80.9% in January last year, while Gemini's grew to 29.4% from 17.3% over the same period.
"I suspect that cross-promotion with X is the biggest reason for Grok's growth," said Nate Elliott, a principal analyst at Emarketer.
X has integrated Grok across the social media platform, featuring it on the navigation bar and also bundling different tiers of premium Grok access with some of its paid subscriptions.
Grok flooded X last month with AI-altered, near-nude images of real people in response to user requests, triggering global outrage and probes. While curbs X announced stopped Grok's account on the platform from producing such images, the Grok chatbot continues to do so when prompted, Reuters found earlier this month.
X and xAI did not respond to Reuters requests for comment on Friday.
Independent journalist Alex Kantrowitz's Big Technology newsletter first reported the data.
Musk overhauled xAI's management on Wednesday following recent departures of several co-founders that left the startup with only half of its original 12 co-founders and raised questions about stability at the company.
But he cheered the growth in usage at the platform.
"We are also generating 6 billion images in the last 30 days ... Google recently posted that ... 1 billion images were generated using Nano banana in 30 days," an xAI executive said on Wednesday during an all-hands meeting posted on X, comparing xAI's image-generation tool with that of Google's.
"So, you know, we're six times that, right?"
(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru)
