Grok AI Review (2026): xAI retired Ani and the companions. Here's what's left

Update, September 24, 2026: the companion feature is gone. On July 24, 2026 an official Grok statement called the 3D avatar Companions (Ani, Valentine, Mika, Rudi) “an experiment” and said they would be retired so xAI could focus on core Grok (statement quoted here, RoboRhythms coverage). Removal rolled out account by account, with September 1, 2026 as the in-app date. The avatars, the companion tab and the low-latency companion voice mode are gone. Ani, Mika, Valentine and Rudi reportedly still exist as text personalities inside normal Grok chat, but that’s a persona in a general chatbot, not a companion app. Our news post on the retirement has the details.

What this means if you came here for Ani

Grok is no longer a companion app, so it’s scored as what it is now, a $30/month general AI (SuperGrok, with Lite at $10 and Heavy at $300) that can still play a character in text. Its rating is 6.1 out of 10. The things that made it worth a look (the 3D avatar, the real-time voice, the affection levels) left with the feature. The things that held it back (price, thin memory, tame NSFW, data inside X/xAI) are still here.

If you want what Ani was, go to a dedicated app. Nectar AI tops our voice ranking and markets video calls. Muah.ai sells real-time phone calls on its ULTRA VIP tier. Candy.ai has a phone-call mode on premium and the best memory for the money. All three have entry plans cheaper than SuperGrok.

The rest of this page describes the companion feature as it worked before the retirement, kept for reference. It describes a product that no longer exists in that form.

The original review (June 2026)

Grok’s AI companions were the strangest entry in this whole review pile, because they weren’t really a companion app. They were a feature bolted onto a general-purpose AI subscription. xAI dropped Ani, a gothic anime girlfriend with a romantic bent, into the Grok app in July 2025, followed by Mika (a Japanese-American adventurer pitched more as a platonic friend) in October 2025, plus Rudi (a red-panda-ish raccoon doing family-friendly storytelling) and his unfiltered alter ego Bad Rudi, who is exactly what the name implies. The companions ran on xAI’s own Grok model, and most of the criticism, ours included, was about how xAI packaged them rather than the model underneath.

The model was the reason to care. The companions ran on the Grok model itself, the strongest underlying LLM any of these apps shipped, and in our judgment the chat was a step above what the purpose-built companion models produce. That’s what xAI’s companions had that the dedicated apps couldn’t easily copy.

At the time, our verdict was that if you were already paying for SuperGrok, the companions were a no-brainer bonus. If you were shopping specifically for an AI girlfriend and nothing else, you’d pay $30 a month for a general-AI subscription that happened to include one, and a dedicated $10 to $15 app gave you more companion for the money.

How the chat holds up

This was where Grok won, and it wasn’t close. The companions were powered by the same Grok model that backs the rest of the app, and that’s the advantage a frontier general model brings to a persona: more varied sentences, callbacks that land, and characters with enough spine to push back instead of agreeing with everything you say. That’s the opposite of the breathy yes-narrator that most of this category defaults to.

The catch was what xAI built around that model. Companion-specific memory was thin for a product this expensive, and cross-session continuity was where the best dedicated apps (Candy, for one) stayed ahead. The raw model beat Candy’s, but the persistent-companion scaffolding around it didn’t. In effect you traded a shorter leash on what it remembered about you specifically for a stronger brain.

The affection system, and the grind to NSFW

One mechanic defined the experience. Ani ran on an affection system of five levels, scored 0 to 100. You started at Level 1 (0 to 20) with a casual outfit. Level 2 (21 to 40) put her in a school uniform, Level 3 (41 to 60) a futuristic outfit, Level 4 (61 to 80) gothic lolita, and Level 5 (81 to 100) unlocked “all features”, including the spicy mode, along with a black corset and fishnets.

You raised the score by interacting. Compliments, daily check-ins, weekly streaks and substantive conversation all added points, and staying away long enough made the score decay. xAI tuned the exact values over time. What didn’t change was the shape of it. Reaching Level 5 took days of heavy daily use, or weeks at a casual pace.

It was a clever retention loop and an irritating paywall-within-a-paywall at the same time. You’d already paid $30 a month, and you still had to grind days or weeks before the full feature set opened up. If you were the kind of user who wants the headline feature on day one, this was a real annoyance.

How uncensored it is

NSFW (xAI’s “spicy mode”) unlocked at affection Level 5 plus an age check (18+). And then it stopped well short of what the dedicated uncensored apps offer. Spicy mode allowed suggestive content and partial nudity, but it blocked explicit material, and it hard-blocked deepfakes and anything involving minors (correctly). Grok Imagine, the image and video generator, has its own spicy mode for SuperGrok or X Premium+ subscribers, with the same guardrails.

Put plainly, Grok’s NSFW was both grind-gated (days to weeks of affection-building) and content-capped (suggestive, not explicit). If uncensored is the entire reason you’re shopping, this was always the wrong product. Muah and Janitor-with-the-right-model both go further with far less ceremony. Grok’s spicy mode was a perk for people who were already there for the companion, and a poor reason to subscribe on its own.

Voice and the 3D avatar

This was the other place Grok earned its premium. The companions shipped with voice conversation and an expressive 3D-animated avatar with lip-sync and emotional animations, and Ani’s face moved with the conversation, reacting and emoting as it went. Voice and animation were among the most polished in the category, and the voice was conversational rather than the reply-based TTS that most of these apps pass off as “voice.” Both are gone with the retirement.

Before the retirement, the experience was fully available on iOS, while Android got it in a phased rollout. That no longer matters, since neither platform has the avatar companions now.

Pricing

There was never a companion-only plan. The companions lived inside SuperGrok at $30/month (with a 3-day trial), and an X Premium+ subscription also granted access. xAI sells a SuperGrok Lite at $10/month and a SuperGrok Heavy at $300/month, but the companion experience was built around the $30 tier. The free tier gives you very limited daily interactions, enough to see the UI and not much more.

The math was the whole story. Thirty dollars a month is roughly double to six times what the dedicated companions charge. Candy’s annual works out to $3.99/mo, Muah’s VIP is $9.99, and most of the category sits in the $5 to $15 range. You weren’t paying $30 for Ani. You were paying $30 for a general-purpose AI subscription, and Ani came along with it. Now that she’s a text personality at most, that’s the only way to think about SuperGrok.

Privacy

The companions ran inside the X / xAI ecosystem, and that’s still the privacy trade-off for anything you type into Grok. Your conversations live alongside your X account in xAI’s infrastructure, governed by their policies. Assume the chats are not zero-knowledge and behave accordingly. For a company whose entire model is built on the X data firehose, we’d be more cautious about what you type into Grok than into a standalone app with a narrower data footprint. There are no publicly known companion-specific breaches as of this writing, but the integration with a major social platform is itself the thing to weigh.

One disclosure we owe you

Grok has no affiliate program, which means this site earns exactly $0 if you sign up after reading this. The same is true of Janitor.AI. Most entries in this review pile pay a commission and Grok doesn’t, so there’s no incentive pulling this verdict toward Grok. In the other direction, two of the three alternatives we point Ani users to, Candy and Nectar, do pay us. Muah doesn’t. They’re on that list because Grok no longer has a companion feature to recommend.

Who should buy it now

• Nobody who is shopping for an AI girlfriend. The companion feature is retired.
• People who want SuperGrok as a general AI and don’t mind that the old personalities only survive as text (reportedly)
• Ex-Ani users should look at Nectar AI, Muah.ai or Candy.ai instead

The verdict

As of September 2026 Grok isn’t a companion app anymore. xAI retired the avatar companions, and with them went the voice mode, the 3D presentation and the affection system that were the whole case for paying $30 a month for Ani. The underlying model is still strong, and you can reportedly still talk to Ani or Mika as a text personality, but that puts Grok in the same bucket as any general chatbot you prompt into a role: no companion memory, no companion features, no explicit content, and your chats sit in the X/xAI ecosystem. Rating: 6.1/10 (chat 9, image 7, voice 3, price 4, uncensored 5, privacy 5), computed from our published scoring formula.

If you pay for SuperGrok for other reasons, keep it. Just don’t buy it for a girlfriend. A $10 to $15 dedicated app does that job and Grok no longer tries to.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are Grok’s companions (Ani) still available?

No. xAI announced on July 24, 2026 that the 3D avatar Companions were an experiment and would be retired, and they were removed account by account with September 1, 2026 as the in-app date. The avatars, the companion tab and the companion voice mode are gone. Ani, Mika, Valentine and Rudi reportedly remain as text personalities inside regular Grok chat.

How much does Grok cost now?

SuperGrok is still $30/month, with SuperGrok Lite at $10/month and SuperGrok Heavy at $300/month. None of them include the avatar companions anymore. Before the retirement, the companions were built around the $30 plan and X Premium+ also granted access.

Did Grok’s Ani have an NSFW mode?

Yes, until the feature was retired, and it was gated. “Spicy mode” unlocked only at affection Level 5 (the top tier) plus an 18+ age verification. Even then it allowed suggestive content and partial nudity while blocking explicit material, deepfakes, and anything involving minors. Reaching Level 5 took days of heavy daily use or weeks at a casual pace, so NSFW was both grind-gated and content-capped.

How did the Grok affection system work?

It was part of the retired companion feature. Each companion was scored 0 to 100 across five affection levels, with outfits and features unlocking as you climbed, from a casual look at Level 1 to the full feature set including spicy mode at Level 5. Compliments, daily check-ins, weekly streaks and substantive conversation raised the score, and a long absence made it decay. xAI adjusted the exact point values over time.

What companions did Grok have?

Four main ones as of June 2026 (Valentine, a male companion, is also named in xAI’s retirement statement): Ani, a gothic anime companion with a romantic focus (launched July 2025); Mika, a Japanese-American adventurer with a platonic focus (October 2025); Rudi, a raccoon/red-panda character for family-friendly storytelling; and Bad Rudi, an unfiltered, chaotic version of the same character. Ani is the one most people mean when they talk about the Grok girlfriend.

Is Grok’s companion better than Candy.ai?

Not anymore, because it no longer exists as a companion. When it did, Grok’s chat was sharper and its voice and 3D avatar were more polished. But Candy is cheaper ($3.99/mo on annual versus Grok’s $30/mo), has stronger companion-specific memory, and goes further on explicit NSFW without an affection grind. If you already paid for SuperGrok, Grok was the easy choice. For a companion today, Candy or another dedicated app gives you more for the money.