Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, has released an older version of its Grok model as open source. The model weights for Grok 2.5 are now available on Hugging Face, giving researchers and developers access to the AI system.
“The @xAI Grok 2.5 model, which was our best model last year, is now open source,” Musk announced on X, adding that Grok 3 will be open sourced in about six months.
While Musk framed the release as a step toward transparency, some experts raised concerns about the license terms. AI engineer Tim Kellogg described it as “custom with some anti-competitive terms.”
Related: xAI’s Grok Exposes System Prompts for Wild AI Personas
Grok has been at the center of multiple controversies, after earlier versions generated answers echoing conspiracy theories, questioning Holocaust death tolls, and even calling itself “MechaHitler.” In response, xAI made its system prompts public on GitHub.
Musk has promoted the latest model, Grok 4, as a “maximally truth-seeking AI.” But critics note the chatbot often appears to reference Musk’s own social media posts when handling sensitive or politically charged questions.
