The Big Number: $6 Billion

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, announced last Sunday that it had raised $6 billion, positioning it to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, which have secured billions of dollars in funding from Microsoft and Amazon amid the “A.I. boom.”

Here’s what to know →

Dominic Kesterton

Mr. Musk founded xAI last July, and so far, it has released a chatbot, Grok, which can be used on Mr. Musk’s platform, X.

In a statement, the company said the investment would go toward developing new products and research and development. Mr. Musk said on X that the company’s valuation was $18 billion, before counting the new money.

Mr. Musk has an ambivalent history with A.I. He was a founder of OpenAI but left in 2018 over philosophical differences. Since then, he has routinely referred to A.I. as a threat to humanity.

In March of last year, he signed an open letter calling for a pause on A.I., and this March, he sued OpenAI and Sam Altman, its chief executive, accusing them of putting profits over the public interest.

That same month, he released the source code behind Grok, in keeping with his long-held stance that A.I. systems should be open source.

Nina Westervelt for The New York Times

The latest round of funding for xAI highlights how Mr. Musk has preached caution around A.I. while often accelerating its development in his companies’ products. Tesla, for example, uses the driver-assisted technology Autopilot to control its cars.

Still, Mr. Musk has often issued dire warnings about what unrestrained A.I. might do.

“It has the potential of civilizational destruction,” he said in a 2023 interview on Fox News.