xAI Retires Grok's Companions: Ani, Mika, Valentine and Rudi Lose Their Avatars
September 2026: xAI removed Grok's 3D avatar Companions, calling them an experiment. What's gone, what reportedly remains, and where ex-Ani users can go.
xAI has pulled the plug on Grok’s Companions. On July 24, 2026 an official Grok statement described the 3D avatar Companions feature (Ani, Valentine, Mika and Rudi) as “an experiment” and said it would be retired so the team could focus on core Grok. The statement is quoted in this post on X, and RoboRhythms covered the shutdown. Removal didn’t happen for everyone on one day. It rolled out account by account, with September 1, 2026 as the date given in the app.
That’s about fourteen months after Ani showed up in the Grok app in July 2025. Mika followed in October 2025, and Valentine, the male companion, joined the lineup along the way.
What’s gone
The part people paid for. The animated 3D avatars with lip-sync, the dedicated companion tab, and the low-latency voice mode built for the companions are all removed. The affection levels and outfit unlocks lived inside that companion experience, so there’s nothing left to grind toward.
What reportedly stays
According to secondary reporting, Ani, Mika, Valentine and Rudi still exist as text personalities inside normal Grok chat. You can pick one and talk to it, but it’s the regular chatbot wearing a character, without the avatar or the companion voice. We haven’t checked this ourselves, so treat it as reported, not guaranteed.
Pricing hasn’t moved. SuperGrok is still $30 a month, with SuperGrok Lite at $10 and SuperGrok Heavy at $300. What changed is what the $30 buys. In June it bought a general AI plus the most polished avatar presentation in the category. Now it buys a general AI.
What it means for our rankings
We’ve taken Grok out of the all-round and voice rankings. It was never a companion app in the first place, just a companion feature inside a general AI subscription, and now the feature is gone too. Our Grok review stays up with an update at the top and a new score of 5.5, down from 7.9. The original June write-up is still there below it if you want to know what Ani was like.
Our complaint in June was that Grok had a great model with a thin companion layer around it: memory that faded across sessions, NSFW behind days of affection grinding, and a $30 price for something dedicated apps sell for a third of that. Calling the feature an experiment and cutting it fits that picture.
Where ex-Ani users can go
If what you liked about Ani was hearing her talk back, you want an app built around voice.
- Nectar AI sits at the top of our voice ranking and markets video calls as a live feature.
- Muah.ai has the lowest-latency real-time voice calls we’ve scored, on its top tier. It also goes much further on NSFW than Grok ever did. Read up on its 2024 breach before you sign up.
- Candy.ai has a phone-call mode on premium, memory that actually holds across sessions, and costs $3.99 a month on the annual plan.
None of them has Ani’s anime 3D avatar, but all three cost less than SuperGrok.
If you only used Ani because you already paid for SuperGrok, you don’t need to change anything. The personalities are reportedly still there in text, and the rest of Grok works as before.