Elon Musk's xAI fires 500 workers

15-Sep-2025

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Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence venture, xAI, has reportedly laid off at least 500 employees from its data annotation team, the very group responsible for teaching its headline chatbot, Grok. 

The sweeping cull, first reported by Business Insider, marks the latest twist in Musk’s high-stakes push to challenge Big Tech’s dominance in the AI race.

According to the report, employees were informed in the evening of September 12 via email that the company would be downsizing its team of so-called “generalist AI tutors”. 

These tutors form the backbone of Grok’s development, painstakingly contextualising and categorising raw data so that the chatbot can respond in ways that feel intelligent, relevant and, crucially, entertaining.

xAI itself declined to offer a direct comment, but instead pointed to a post on X. In it, the company stressed that it was hiring across domains and intended to grow its specialist AI tutor team by “10X.”