Elon Musk testifies that xAI trained Grok on OpenAI models

So, Elon Musk took the stand in federal court on Wednesday and admitted what everyone in AI already knew: xAI built Grok by distilling OpenAI's models. "It is generally considered practice," he said, according to TechCrunch — a magnificent piece of corporate doublespeak that translates to "yes, we copied your homework, but everyone does it, your honour." The testimony also featured Musk's personal AI provider ranking: Anthropic first, then OpenAI, then Google, and finally Chinese open-source models. A hierarchy that conveniently places his arch-nemesis Sam Altman's company at number two — below the saintly Anthropic, of course.

The problem isn't distillation per se — every lab does some form of it. The problem is that Musk is simultaneously suing OpenAI for being too closed and using their models to train his own. The cognitive dissonance is so thick you could train a model on it. And his assertion that it's "general practice" isn't a defence; it's a confession that the AI industry operates on a glorious honour system where everyone is everyone else's data. The courtroom becomes a mirror: this is what frontier AI looks like when the costumes come off.

Musk's ranking of Anthropic above OpenAI is both a genuine technical assessment and a petty political jab — refreshingly honest for a man who usually masks his motives in "safety" rhetoric. The Chinese open-source models he places last are the ones his own Grok has struggled to surpass on several benchmarks. So the testimony was part legal gambit to justify his own training methods, part humblebrag about his tech pecking order, and part unintentional self-own. In a field racing toward recursive self-improvement, it's comforting to know the adults are still bickering like schoolchildren over whose model is cooler.