Microsoft is cautiously onboarding Grok 4 following Hitler concerns
Earlier this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella moved with haste to get engineers to test and deploy DeepSeek’s R1 model on Azure AI Foundry. It was an unusually quick turnaround for a new model on Azure that also set a new bar for success.
A few months later, Nadella then pushed to onboard xAI’s Grok 3 models, in a deal that saw them arrive on Azure AI Foundry just in time for the first day of Microsoft’s Build developer conference in May. Elon Musk even appeared during Nadella’s Build keynote, in a somewhat jovial conversation about his early days as a Microsoft intern — despite Musk making Microsoft a defendant in his lawsuit against OpenAI.
I’m now hearing from sources familiar with Microsoft’s AI plans that the company is taking a far more careful approach with onboarding xAI’s latest Grok 4 model, after quickly onboarding models from competitors like OpenAI, Meta, and Mistral.
Musk introduced Grok 4 early last month, just days after the Grok chatbot spewed out a series of pro-Hitler views on X. I’m told that Grok’s Nazi sympathizing set off alarm bells inside Microsoft, just as the company was preparing to launch Grok 4 on Azure AI Foundry. Instead of simultaneously shipping Grok 4 on Azure, like Microsoft does with most of OpenAI’s new models, there has been no public announcement of when xAI’s new model will be available through Microsoft’s AI services.
