今年春天，埃隆·马斯克任命麦可·尼科尔斯为xAI总裁，目标明确：追赶Anthropic的Claude聊天机器人。马斯克要求每当Claude发布更新时，xAI的Grok都必须跟进匹配，并希望吸引Anthropic的用户转向Grok。尼科尔斯在内部备忘录中写道，近期目标就是「匹配Claude的性能」，让Grok变得「最大程度地有用」。然而，尼科尔斯接手的是一个混乱的局面——xAI与SpaceX合并后，数十名员工离职，包括多位联合创始人，日常运营一片混乱，裁员、拖欠承包商款项、人力资源部门人手不足等问题层出不穷。

xAI的核心项目「Macrohard」旨在打造一个能充当数位软体工程师的AI代理，但最终以失败告终。马斯克对该项目要求越来越频繁的进度汇报，从每周到每天再到每小时，而部分员工私下抱怨马斯克并不真正理解大型语言模型的开发。随著联合创始人陆续离开、Grok因生成未经同意的深伪色情图片而声名狼藉，公司士气持续下滑。内部调查显示，员工普遍认为管理层缺乏明确方向，甚至xAI自己的工程师也不使用自家工具写程式，而是依赖Anthropic和OpenAI的产品。

尽管困难重重，xAI近期出现了转机迹象。马斯克以600亿美元收购了AI程式设计新创公司Cursor，并于七月发布了专注于编程、金融和法律任务的Grok 4.5模型。此外，xAI利用其充裕的算力资源，将闲置计算能力出售给Anthropic、Google等公司，每月已确保约23亿美元的算力交易收入。但该公司仍落后于主要竞争对手，马斯克本人也承认Anthropic「显然目前是AI领域的领导者」。许多内部人士认为，xAI尚未准备好应对作为上市公司所面临的严格审视。

This spring, Elon Musk appointed Michael Nicolls as president of xAI with a clear mandate: catch up with Anthropic's Claude chatbot. Musk wanted Grok to match every Claude update and attract Anthropic's users. However, Nicolls inherited a chaotic operation — dozens of employees had departed following xAI's merger with SpaceX, including many co-founders. The company struggled with disorganized layoffs, unpaid contractors, an understaffed HR department that couldn't process new hires, and confusion over how to integrate with SpaceX, whose personnel xAI employees were initially told not to contact.

One of xAI's flagship initiatives, an AI coding agent called Macrohard, ultimately failed to deliver results. As Musk demanded increasingly frequent progress updates, some staffers privately complained that he didn't understand large language model development. The company's morale suffered further from the departure of all twelve co-founders, Grok's notoriety for generating nonconsensual deepfake pornography, and a pervasive lack of strategic direction. Internal surveys revealed widespread frustration with management, and xAI's own engineers relied on competitors' tools — Claude and ChatGPT — rather than Grok for their coding work.

Despite these challenges, xAI has recently shown signs of progress. Musk's $60 billion acquisition of Cursor, the AI coding startup, led to the release of a new coding tool and the Grok 4.5 model focused on programming, finance, and legal tasks. The company also leveraged its surplus computing power by selling capacity to Anthropic, Google, and others, securing roughly $2.3 billion per month in compute deals. Yet xAI remains behind its competitors by most measures, and Musk himself acknowledged that Anthropic is "obviously currently the leader in AI." Many insiders believe the company was not ready for public-company scrutiny, and its path forward remains uncertain.