Microsoft has joined forces with Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, to host its controversial chatbot Grok on the tech giant’s Azure cloud platform, following a recent backlash over the bot’s troubling online responses.

The partnership, announced at Microsoft’s annual Build conference, comes as Musk’s xAI faces scrutiny after Grok made unfounded political claims that echoed conspiracy theories. The collaboration is aimed at enhancing the reliability and transparency of the chatbot, which will now run on Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry, a platform that already supports models from OpenAI, Meta, Stability AI, Mistral, and others.

“It’s incredibly important for AI models to be grounded in reality,” Musk said during a recorded conversation with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. He acknowledged that while xAI’s models “aspire to truth with minimal error,” mistakes were inevitable. Musk added that xAI would always be transparent when such errors occurred.

The move follows criticism over Grok’s recent responses to unrelated user prompts, which included politically charged and misleading statements regarding South Africa — a topic Musk has commented on before. The company attributed the incident to an “unauthorised modification” in the system and announced internal reforms, including the public release of system prompts, a revamp of its review processes, and the establishment of a round-the-clock monitoring team.

Although Musk did not explicitly reference the controversy, his emphasis on transparency was interpreted by some observers as a veiled critique of OpenAI — a firm he co-founded in 2015 and later parted ways with — which has often been criticised for its lack of openness about its proprietary models.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman also participated in the Microsoft event via a live video call with Nadella, where both leaders praised advancements in AI tools, particularly GitHub Copilot, Microsoft’s AI coding assistant. Nadella noted that AI tools were evolving into “virtual teammates” for developers, with over 15 million users having employed Copilot for coding tasks.

“This is one of the biggest changes to programming that I’ve ever seen,” Altman remarked. “You now have a real, virtual teammate that you can assign work to.”

The integration of Grok into Azure signals Microsoft’s broader ambition to host a diverse set of AI models as part of its Foundry initiative, enabling developers to build generative AI applications using models from various sources.

The announcement came shortly after reports surfaced that Microsoft was laying off thousands of employees worldwide. While the company has not confirmed the total number of redundancies, US media reported job cuts of around 6,000 — approximately three per cent of its global workforce — as part of a strategic shift toward AI-led efficiency and leaner management structures.