xAI Pays Telegram $300 Million to Integrate Grok Chatbot
Elon Musk's xAI pays Telegram $300 million in cash and equity to distribute the Grok chatbot across its platform for one year. Telegram will also earn half of the revenue from xAI subscriptions purchased directly within the app.
Telegram and Elon Musk’s AI company xAI form a major new partnership to distribute the Grok chatbot across the messaging platform for one year. As part of the agreement, xAI pays Telegram $300 million in a combination of cash and equity. Telegram CEO Pavel Durov announces that his company will also receive 50% of the revenue generated from any xAI subscriptions purchased through the app.
The integration brings Grok directly into the daily workflow of Telegram users. A demonstration video shared by Durov shows that users can pin Grok on top of their chats and access the AI directly from the search bar. The chatbot assists users by providing writing suggestions, summarizing chats and documents, and creating custom stickers. It also acts as a tool for businesses to answer customer questions and helps with content moderation.
This expansion makes Grok available to all Telegram users, moving beyond its previous limitation to premium subscribers. The search bar integration mirrors a similar strategy recently adopted by Meta, which now features Meta AI in the search bars of Instagram and WhatsApp. The massive $300 million deal highlights the fierce competition among tech giants to embed their AI assistants into popular social platforms.