Elon Musk’s xAI launches Grok Business, Enterprise tiers to take on OpenAI

Elon Musk-owned xAI on Wednesday, December 31, introduced two new subscription tiers for small businesses and larger organisations to access its Grok series of AI models for workplace tasks.

Grok Business and Grok Enterprise will provide customers with the highest rate limits on the most advanced AI models developed by xAI through a single platform, the AI startup said in a blog post. While Grok Business is aimed at small-to-medium teams, larger organisations can subscribe to Grok Enterprise for additional features such as Custom Single Sign On (SSO), Directory Sync (SCIM), advanced audit and security controls, and more.

xAI also emphasised that proprietary enterprise data processed by its AI models will never be used to train other AI models. The company’s two AI enterprise offerings have been made available to all users from December 31. It is the latest effort by the billionaire-owned AI startup to compete with rivals such as Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic in the fast-growing market for workplace AI tools.

While the enterprise market for AI tools has become increasingly crowded over the past year, the adoption and scaling of these tools to automate workflows across organisations remains in the nascent stages. The launch of Grok Business and Grok Enterprise also comes at a time when several studies have found that AI usage at large companies has rarely been making it past the pilot stage.

In April 2025, KPMG’s quarterly survey of 130 American business leaders at companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue found that the share of companies introducing AI beyond a pilot programme has remained stagnant, even though more businesses than ever are experimenting with the technology.

Grok, the AI chatbot that has been natively integrated into Musk’s social media platform, X, ran into several behavioural issues and sparked more than one controversy last year.

For instance, in June 2025, the chatbot referred to itself as ‘MechaHitler’, re-shared conspiracy theories, and made inappropriate comments in response to users’ posts on X. A few months later, Grok again responded to some users by saying that Musk would be more effective than Hitler at conquering Europe and would make for a better role model than Jesus Christ.

Despite these high-profile spirals, the US government awarded xAI a $200 million contract to modernise Defense Department through ‘Grok for Government’, alongside Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, Grok Business customers can pull in data from their company’s tools like Google Drive and share AI-generated insights with their teammates. The links are only accessible by those you share them with, xAI said. The company claimed that Grok Business has permission-awareness by design and respects users’ existing Google Drive permissions. “Every answer includes citations linking directly to source documents, with quote previews and highlighted relevant sections,” it said.

Grok’s models made available through the Business subscription are also capable of performing agentic search through its Collections API via Projects. “This is useful for when Grok needs to use a large document store as a primary source, such as a data room for analyzing legal documentation or building financial models,” xAI further said.

As part of the Grok Enterprise tier, customers have access to all the capabilities under Grok Business along with additional features such as Custom Single Sign On (SSO), Directory Sync (SCIM), and advanced audit and security controls.

In terms of security and privacy, xAI said that enterprise customers’ data is encrypted in transit and at rest. “When using enterprise vault, you will have an isolated data plane where all data is stored and accessed independently of the shared consumer stack,” it said.

The AI startup is also planning to upgrade its enterprise-focused tiers in the coming months, including adding more connections to company apps, customisable AI agents, and improved sharing and collaboration capabilities.