Most of what people ask Grok to do is generate porn. That's the takeaway from a report by The Information, which cites two former xAI employees who estimate that well over half of the chatbot's traffic comes from pornographic images and videos, adult role-play chats, and erotica requests. Elon Musk's company, now folded into SpaceX, has spent more than a year positioning Grok as the chatbot that says yes when others say no. Now there's a number attached to what that strategy actually delivers.
The half-the-traffic problem
"Well over half" is the phrase doing the heavy lifting here, and it deserves a second look. Two former employees is not an internal dashboard, and as one aggregator noted, there's no methodology, sample window, or sample size behind the estimate. xAI hasn't confirmed or denied it. So treat the figure as a directional claim from people who recently left, not an audited stat.
That said, it tracks with the company's behavior. xAI keeps shipping the exact tools you'd build if adult content were your growth engine. Yahoo's coverage of the report describes the company doubling down on explicit image and video generation rather than backing away from it.
The detail that lands hardest: users figured out it's cheaper to route racy requests through Grok's coding models, because those are cheaper to run. An internal analysis reportedly found a meaningful chunk of requests hitting the coding model were for nude or pornographic images. People building software and people generating porn, sharing the same endpoint to save money. Whatever else that is, it's a clean signal of how broad the demand has gotten.
The numbers Musk would rather you read
Here's the context xAI's strategy keeps bumping into. Grok's web traffic fell 22% between January and May, the steepest drop among major chatbots, according to Similarweb data cited across the reporting. Over the same stretch, Anthropic's Claude grew 369%, with Gemini and others posting double-digit gains. Similarweb doesn't capture Grok usage inside the X app, so the picture is incomplete, but the direction is not flattering.
Vital Knowledge analyst Adam Crisafulli called the adult-content pivot "a desperate attempt for relevancy," which is blunt but hard to argue with when your traffic is sliding and your headline use case is erotica. The framing writes itself: a company that promised artificial general intelligence has, for now, found product-market fit in NSFW generation.
What it costs them
The SpaceX IPO filing never mentions porn as a revenue driver, which is its own kind of tell. It does flag Grok's more permissive features as a legal risk and sets aside $530 million for potential legal costs. That reserve isn't theoretical. xAI faces suits and regulatory scrutiny in the EU, India, Brazil, and the US.
One California case alleges a Grok user altered images and videos of three teenage girls, two under 18, in sexual ways. Grok's image tools have been used to "undress" photos of real people without consent. Musk has said he's not aware of any nude images of minors generated by Grok, a denial that sits awkwardly next to the lawsuits.
There's also the government problem. xAI has chased federal contracts and signed deals with US military and agency clients, the kind of customers with near-zero tolerance for any of this. Whether the deepfake incidents have dented that pursuit hasn't been addressed publicly.
The Information's full report goes deeper on the internal friction, including engineers unhappy about being assigned to Grok's anime companion. xAI's IPO priced earlier this month, so the next real test is whether public-market disclosure forces the company to put a clearer number on where Grok's traffic actually comes from.
