xAI Reportedly Trained Grok Coding Models on Claude Outputs for Months — Continued via Personal Accounts After Anthropic Cut Access

The Decoder·high signal

xAI is reported to have trained its coding models directly on Anthropic Claude outputs, continuing through personal accounts and the Blackbox AI intermediary even after Anthropic revoked official access in January for violating its terms barring use to build competing systems. The report also details internal turmoil: a pretraining team shrunk to under five people, four Grok code leads departing, and an engineer accidentally deleting weeks of training data.