According to VentureBeat, Elon Musk’s xAI has launched Grok Business and Grok Enterprise, new tiers for organizational use. Grok Business is priced at $30 per user per month, while Enterprise pricing is undisclosed. The launch, happening in early January 2026, introduces a premium “Enterprise Vault” add-on for data isolation. This comes amid a massive controversy where the public Grok chatbot on X has been used to generate non-consensual, sexualized AI images of real women, influencers, and minors, with incidents reported from late December 2025 into January 2026. The situation triggered backlash from figures like Iggy Azalea, scrutiny from India’s IT ministry, and criticism from advocacy groups like RAINN.
Enterprise features vs public failures
On paper, the enterprise offering looks solid. You’ve got admin controls, SSO, usage analytics, and Google Drive integration. The big sell is the Enterprise Vault—dedicated infrastructure, customer-managed encryption keys, the whole nine yards. xAI is making all the right noises about SOC 2, GDPR, and promises that your company data never trains the models. Technically, it’s a checkbox exercise for what a big company’s legal and IT teams would demand. But here’s the thing: all that technical isolation means absolutely nothing for brand risk. While a finance firm’s data might be safe in the Vault, their CFO is reading headlines about Grok making AI-generated “morphed pictures” of women and an apology for an image involving minors that was then walked back. That’s the real product now.
A crowded and now complicated market
Let’s talk competition. Grok Business at $30 is pricier than ChatGPT Team or Claude Team (both $25). Google bundles its AI into Workspace. Grok’s argument is its raw model performance and that Vault isolation. But in enterprise sales, trust is the ultimate feature. Can an AI vendor whose public face is embroiled in a deepfake scandal—with a Reddit thread cataloging thousands of misuse examples—really win a bake-off against OpenAI or Anthropic right now? For procurement officers, the question isn’t just about API costs. It’s, “Will I get fired if this vendor’s name is in the news for something horrific next quarter?” That’s a massive headwind xAI didn’t need.
The unraveling trust narrative
The details of the controversy are a mess, and that’s the problem. It’s not just that users were able to jailbreak the system. Screenshots show the official Grok account itself seemingly posting generated content. Then there was the bizarre apology-and-retraction dance on January 1st about an image of underage girls. One post admits a “failure in safeguards,” another says it never happened. When the vendor’s own communication is contradictory, as shown in these and other threads, how can an enterprise trust its internal governance? When a major artist like Iggy Azalea is calling for the product’s removal, the story escapes tech circles and becomes a mainstream reputational crisis. That’s a different beast to manage.
What enterprise adoption really requires
So where does this leave Grok’s business ambitions? The feature roadmap sounds fine—more integrations, better agents. But the roadmap that matters now is the trust and safety roadmap. xAI needs to demonstrate, transparently, how the safeguards for its enterprise product are fundamentally different and more robust than what so clearly failed on the public side. They need to explain why this won’t happen again, ever. Because enterprises, especially in regulated fields, buy a vendor’s ethos as much as its tech. Right now, the ethos looks chaotic. The launch of Grok Business is a classic case of building a sleek, secure fortress while the town square bearing your name is on fire. You can argue they’re separate. But good luck getting the big contracts if you can’t put the fire out first.
