Musk’s xAI pressured staff to feed their biometric data into its sex chatbot project

Employees at Elon Musk’s xAI were ordered to surrender facial and voice data to feed the company’s explicit artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, or they’d lose their jobs.

The pressure campaign, revealed through internal documents and recordings obtained by The Wall Street Journal, shows how far some tech companies will go to build their products.

The confrontation happened during an April meeting at xAI’s Palo Alto offices. Company lawyer Lily Lim told employees they needed to provide facial scans and voice recordings for something called Project Skippy.

When one worker asked the question, everyone was thinking, the answer wasn’t reassuring. “Could you just explicitly, for the record, let us know if there’s some option to opt out?” the employee said, according to a recording of the meeting.

Lim dodged the question entirely. “If you have any concerns with regards to the project, you’re welcome to reach out to any of the points of contact listed on the second slide,” she replied.

The message became clearer a week later. Employees received a notice stating that recording sessions were “a job requirement to advance xAI’s mission.”

Their biometric data would help create Ani, an anime-styled chatbot that launched in July with sexually explicit features. The product offers what The Verge described as “a modern take on a phone sex line” to subscribers paying $30 monthly for xAI’s SuperGrok service.

Source: X

Some workers later told the Journal they felt disturbed watching their data transform into sexual content. Others worried their faces could end up in deepfake videos or be sold to other companies through the broad licensing agreement they’d signed.

That agreement gave xAI “a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, royalty-free license” to use workers’ biometric data however the company wanted. Forever.

Asked about the biometric data collection by Gizmodo, an xAI spokesperson offered three words: “Legacy Media Lies.”

Musk personally directed Ani’s creation and defended the chatbot on social media. “I predict — counter-intuitively — that it will increase the birth rate! Mark my words,” he posted on X in August.

The controversy attracted regulatory attention. Attorneys general from 44 states sent letters to xAI and other companies in August, warning them to protect minors from explicit AI content.

Privacy experts say the situation in xAI raises serious questions about workplace consent. Illinois and other states have laws requiring explicit permission before companies collect biometric data.

But permission gets complicated when your paycheck depends on saying yes.