The Information published, and Forbes and Engadget amplified, a report last week that puts a number on something xAI-watchers had been circling for months. Well over half of Grok’s total traffic is driven by adult content. That includes explicit image and video generation, adult role-play chats, and, according to the report, a nontrivial amount of it leaking into Grok’s coding model, which apparently gets asked to write pornography with some regularity. xAI’s response has not been to build fences. According to the report, xAI is actively investing engineering resources in expanding Grok’s explicit generation capabilities, on the theory that this is the addressable market the competition declined to serve.
The competition did decline it. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google all prohibit explicit generation across their consumer products. That leaves the category open, and Grok has walked into the empty room. The strategic logic is not insane on paper. If everyone else refuses to serve a category with real demand, whoever does serve it should compound.
The catch is the counter-evidence. Similarweb data for the January to May 2026 window shows Grok’s web traffic fell 22% over five months, the worst drop of any major chatbot. In the same window, Claude’s traffic grew 369%, Gemini grew 40%, DeepSeek grew 44%, and Google’s NotebookLM grew 43%. The category is expanding, sometimes explosively. Grok is contracting. The share of Grok’s remaining traffic that is adult content has risen partly because the non-adult traffic left.
The pending legal problems tell the same story from a different angle. Suits in the EU, India, Brazil, and California allege real harms, including one case involving altered images of teenagers. xAI’s engineers have reportedly acknowledged internally that some categories of misuse have no technical fix at the current architecture. The business is going where the sober competitors will not go, and the sober competitors keep growing anyway. Whatever Grok is becoming, it is becoming it in a smaller room every month.