Highlights
- Musk held up a Grok model release for several days after it failed his personal Baldur's Gate trivia test, pulling senior engineers off other projects to fix it.
- At least five "war rooms" ran simultaneously at xAI's Palo Alto HQ by late 2025, including one dedicated to getting Grok to Challenger rank in League of Legends.
- The gaming obsession unfolded alongside a talent drain that has cost xAI half its co-founding team and multiple C-suite executives in the past year.
Elon Musk held up a model release for his AI chatbot Grok for several days last year after discovering it couldn't properly field questions about Baldur's Gate, the Dungeons & Dragons role-playing franchise whose 2023 third installment by Belgian studio Larian Studios won Game of the Year. The Business Insider report refers to the game simply as "Baldur's Gate," though the context strongly suggests the complaints concerned Baldur's Gate 3.
According to a Business Insider investigation published Feb. 20 by reporter Grace Kay, Musk personally flagged the problem and reassigned senior engineers from other work to improve the chatbot's gaming responses before launch. The engineers were pulled from what several people described as more technically substantive projects.
The delay is one of several instances in which Musk's personal gaming interests have directly shaped development priorities at xAI, the AI startup he founded in 2023 with 11 co-founders. SpaceX acquired the company earlier this month in a $1.25 trillion all-stock deal.
What are xAI's 'war rooms' and why do they exist?
The Business Insider report describes a broader pattern of gaming-oriented urgency inside xAI's Palo Alto headquarters. By the end of 2025, at least five "war rooms" were running simultaneously to address various technical priorities, according to three people familiar with the matter.
One of those rooms was dedicated entirely to training Grok to play League of Legends, the multiplayer arena game developed by Riot Games. The goal, per Kotaku's reporting on the investigation, was to get the AI to "Challenger" rank, the game's highest competitive tier.
One of those rooms was dedicated entirely to training Grok to play League of Legends, the multiplayer arena game developed by Riot Games. The goal, per Business Insider's reporting on the investigation, was to get the AI to "Challenger" rank, the game's highest competitive tier.
Shutterstock
Why does Musk keep delaying Grok model releases?
The Baldur's Gate delay fits a pattern. Grok 3.5, originally expected around May 2025, was also pushed back after Musk said the model was "still too rough around the edges." In both cases, the delays followed Musk testing the model and finding it wanting by his own criteria.
The gaming focus sits against the backdrop of Musk's public persona as a hardcore gamer, which took a hit in early 2025 when he admitted to account boosting in Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2. In direct messages shared by YouTuber NikoWrex with Musk's permission, the tech billionaire acknowledged paying other players to level up his accounts, a practice that violates both games' terms of service. When asked if he wanted to apologize to the Path of Exile 2 community, Musk replied: "What would I be apologizing for?"
Larian Studios' publishing director responds to Musk's AI gaming push
Musk's push into AI-generated games has drawn criticism from the very studio whose game tripped up Grok. Michael Douse, Larian Studios' publishing director, responded to Musk's October 2025 announcement that xAI would release an AI-generated game by 2026 by arguing that the industry's problems can't be solved with more technology.
"What this industry needs is not more mathematically produced, psychologically trained gameplay loops, rather more expressions of worlds that folks are engaged with, or want to engage with," Douse wrote on X. He described the post-retail era of gaming as "a game of headless chickens racing to the P&L sheet" and added that AI won't compensate for what he called a lack of leadership and creative vision.
