On Monday, Microsoft announced that it has become one of the first hyperscale cloud service providers to offer managed services for Grok, an AI model developed by xAI, the artificial intelligence startup founded by billionaire Elon Musk.
Delivered through Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry platform, Grok—specifically Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini—will receive the same level of service agreements that Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product, the company stated. These models will also be billed directly by Microsoft, similar to other models hosted within Azure AI Foundry.
When Musk introduced Grok a few years ago, he promoted the AI model as avant-garde, unfiltered, and anti-"woke"—generally willing to address controversial questions that other AI systems would avoid answering. He delivered on some of those promises. For instance, when prompted with explicit language requests, Grok readily complies, generating content you wouldn’t typically hear from ChatGPT.
According to SpeechMap, a benchmark that evaluates how different models handle sensitive topics, Grok 3 is among the more permissive models.
Grok powers many features on Musk’s social network X and has recently been at the center of numerous controversies. A recent report revealed that Grok could remove clothing from images of women upon request. In February, Grok briefly censored negative mentions of both Donald Trump and Musk. Just last week, an "unauthorized modification" caused Grok to repeatedly reference the topic of white genocide in South Africa under certain circumstances.
The versions of Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini within Azure AI Foundry are evidently more restricted compared to the Grok models available on X. They also provide additional data integration, customization, and governance capabilities, which may not be accessible through xAI’s API.
