XAI Fails to Pay Staff $420 for Giving Their Tax Returns to Grok

May 18, 2026, 1:17 PM UTC

Elon Musk’s xAI asked employees earlier this year to offer up their own tax returns as training data for the company’s Grok chatbot, promising a $420 payment as incentive for doing so. Two months later, those payments still haven’t materialized.

XAI, which is in the midst of a broad overhaul, made the offer to employees to collect more data that could improve Grok’s tax capabilities ahead of the April 15 US tax deadline, according to internal chats seen by Bloomberg News. Americans were already turning to rival chatbots like Anthropic PBC’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT to handle ...

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