Elon Musk's xAI is paying Telegram to inject Grok into its billion+ userbase

Pavel Durov, the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Telegram, has announced that Elon Musk's xAI is paying the messaging platform $300 million for it to adopt Grok, the AI-powered chatbot created by xAI.

Durov explained in a recent X post the details of the deal, which when reading appear to be extremely in the favor of Telegram, as the $300 million the social messaging platform is getting paid is only for a year-long partnership, but it also includes other benefits such as 50% of revenue from xAI subscriptions sold via Telegram. This means that if any users sign up for Grok Premium or Premium+ subscriptions through Telegram, Durov's social messaging platform will take 50% of that sale, presumably for the subscription duration, or until the partnership is ended.

Telegram is home to more than 1 billion monthly users, which is about double the size of X. Perhaps X thinks of this deal as marketing expenditure to get Grok into many more hands, potentially attracting them to the subscription service. However, there could be another motive. 1 billion users = a lot of user data, and Grok is currently training on data on X. It remains to be seen if the deal between the xAI and Telegram includes Grok being able to train on Telegram user data.

However, having an AI gobbling up user data runs contrary to the founding ethos of the Telegram app, which Durov created alongside his brother and released in 2013 with the goal of providing a communications tool that no government, corporation, or advertising algorithm could bend to its will. The whole point of Telegram is messages that are encrypted from end-to-end, meaning Telegram isn't even able to read the contents of the messages.

Durov recently replied to a user mentioning user data, where he said that xAI will only access data Telegram users explicitly share with Grok through direct interactions, such as the messages Telegram users send to the chatbot.