xAI trained coding models on Anthropic's Claude outputs for months before access was revoked

xAI trained its coding model directly on Claude's outputs. After Anthropic revoked official access in January, xAI engineers continued through personal accounts and the intermediary service Blackbox AI.

xAI's pretraining team shrank to under five people, and four Grok code leads left within months along with many co-founders. One employee accidentally deleted critical training data, costing two to three weeks of work.

Musk is now renting compute to Anthropic via SpaceX and to Google instead of training his own models, described as a stopgap measure.