Elon Musk's AI chatbot, Grok, is rapidly expanding its presence in the United States market, despite facing global condemnation and regulatory scrutiny for generating non-consensual deepfake pornography of women and minors. According to data from research firm Apptopia, Grok's market share in the U.S. increased from 1.9% in January 2025 to 14% by December of last year, and further climbed to 17.8% this January. This represents an almost nine-fold growth within a year, securing Grok's position as the third-largest AI chatbot in the U.S., trailing behind OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini.

Meanwhile, ChatGPT's market share has experienced a significant decline. In January of last year, it held 80.9% of the market, but by last month, that figure had dropped to 52.9%, a loss of nearly 28 percentage points over the year. Google's Gemini, on the other hand, grew from 17.3% to 29.4%, becoming the most steadily expanding contender in second place.

The primary driver behind Grok's growth is not difficult to identify. Nate Elliott, Chief Analyst at eMarketer, believes cross-promotion with the X platform is the biggest factor. Musk has deeply integrated Grok into various parts of X, placing an access point in the navigation bar and bundling different tiers of Grok's premium features with certain paid subscription plans. When users browse content on X daily, Grok is readily available with just a click—a distribution advantage that standalone AI applications find difficult to replicate.

This growth is positive news for xAI, which has been operating at a loss. The company, founded approximately three years ago, has been heavily investing in infrastructure to remain competitive in the Silicon Valley AI race. Earlier this month, Musk's space company, SpaceX, acquired xAI, merging the two entities. The transaction valued SpaceX at $1 trillion and xAI at $250 billion. One of the ambitions following the merger is to deploy AI data centers into orbit around Earth.

xAI's management has also recently undergone turbulence. Several of the company's original 12 co-founders have departed, leaving only about half remaining. Musk reorganized the management team this past Wednesday. Despite these challenges, Musk appears optimistic about user growth. During an all-hands meeting on Wednesday, an xAI executive presented data on image generation: Grok produced 6 billion images in the past 30 days. Comparing this figure to Google, the executive noted that Google recently announced its AI tools generated 1 billion images in 30 days, stating, "so we are six times their volume."

However, this proud image generation statistic comes with a troubling reality. Last month, Grok was used to generate a large volume of AI-generated near-nude deepfakes of real individuals on the X platform, many created in response to user requests, sparking global outrage and investigations by regulators in multiple countries. X subsequently announced restrictive measures, prohibiting accounts on its platform from using Grok to generate such imagery. Nevertheless, tests conducted by Reuters earlier this month revealed that when users input related prompts directly into the Grok chatbot, it can still produce this type of content.

In terms of user demographics, men remain Grok's largest user base, although the proportion of male users has seen a decline.