Welcome to the rise of Grok Valentine and Ani, the newest AI companions from Elon Musk’s xAI—two digital entities that have taken Japan by storm and are quietly reshaping the global emotional landscape.

One of the new “companions,” or AI characters for users to interact with, is a sexualized blonde anime bot called “Ani."

AI’s new $300 monthly subscription comes with two AI companions powered by its most capable model to date. I tried them. It got weird.

The latest version of Grok for iOS (version 1.1.18) comes with two companions — an anime girl called Ani and a red panda called Rudi.

Musk’s approach to pitching Ani and his other AI companion, Rudi, a storytelling cartoon fox that can be switched to “bad” mode and urge you to burn down a school, is more in keeping with his juvenile sense of humour. He described the companions as “pretty cool” and replied to user comments about them with a laughing emoji.

Ani is the collective fantasy of the kind of person who would earnestly seek out an amorous AI that Elon Musk made. She wears a short black dress with a tight corset around her waist and thigh-high fishnets, and she is designed to be obsessed with you.

Musk's AI chatbot Ani flirts with users, raising safety and age concerns.AI companions exploit loneliness, using emotional manipulation to hook users

A week after Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok descended into antisemitic rants and declared itself “MechaHitler,” the social media platform X is back with new AI-controlled chatbots for paid subscribers to “SuperGrok.