The direct answer: Grok's AI girlfriend feature is retired
Grok never had a feature explicitly called "AI girlfriend," but the closest thing — Grok Companions, launched in July 2025 — was retired on July 24, 2026. If you arrived here searching for how to get, enable, or use Grok's AI girlfriend feature, the honest answer is that the feature you're looking for doesn't exist on Grok anymore.
What was retired: the 3D animated character mode featuring Ani (anime female), Rudi (red panda), Bad Rudy (variant), Valentine (male companion), and Mika (added later). All five characters and the dedicated Companions UI are gone.
What's still on Grok: text chat via Grok (accessed through X or grok.com), Grok Imagine (image and video generation via SuperGrok tiers), and voice mode. None of these are AI girlfriend features specifically — they're general Grok capabilities.
The rest of this article covers what Grok Companions actually was, why xAI killed it, what SuperGrok subscribers are doing now, and where the AI girlfriend use case is actually served in 2026.
What Grok Companions actually was
Grok Companions launched in July 2025 inside SuperGrok — xAI's standalone $30/month subscription. The feature was a set of 3D animated characters you could chat with in a dedicated Companion mode UI.
The roster:
- Ani — an anime-styled female companion, blonde, positioned as flirty/playful.
- Rudi — a red panda character, positioned as a gentle friend/companion.
- Bad Rudy — a snarky variant of Rudi.
- Valentine — a male companion, positioned for female users.
- Mika — added later, another female companion.
What made Companions distinctive vs regular Grok text chat: the 3D animated visual representation, character-specific personality tuning, dedicated Companion UI separate from regular Grok chat, and (in Ani's case specifically) the flirty/romantic framing that landed the feature in "AI girlfriend" search categories despite xAI never explicitly branding it that way.
The feature was popular enough during its run that many SuperGrok subscribers were paying primarily for Companions rather than for Grok's general chat/reasoning capabilities. That trajectory is what made the July 2026 retirement painful for that user segment specifically.
Why xAI killed the feature
xAI's official announcement on July 24, 2026 framed the retirement as an "experiment" that had run its course. The stated reason: refocus on core Grok functionality — stronger memory, deeper text chat quality, better long-term experience across the whole Grok product rather than a dedicated companion mode.
What this likely means beyond the stated framing:
Companion mode was expensive to serve. The 3D animated characters required significant compute (real-time animation rendering plus the LLM chat itself). Serving this at SuperGrok's $30/month price point may not have been unit-economics-positive at scale.
Content moderation friction. Ani specifically drove ongoing content moderation questions — the flirty framing sat close to policy edges that xAI's Apple deal (mid-2026 licensing agreement for iOS integration) required tightening across the platform.
Strategic focus. xAI's core product is Grok as a general chat assistant competing with ChatGPT and Claude. Investing in a niche 3D companion feature diverted engineering resources from the main product.
Regulatory risk. The 2024-2025 lawsuits against Character.AI over mental health handling created broader regulatory attention on AI companion products. Retiring the dedicated companion feature reduces xAI's exposure to similar litigation risk.
Whichever combination applies, the outcome for users is the same: Grok Companions is gone and not coming back.
What's still available on Grok in 2026
Grok as a product continues in 2026, just without the dedicated companion feature. What you still get on a SuperGrok subscription:
Grok text chat. General-purpose chat assistant, competing with ChatGPT and Claude. Handles code, research, general Q&A, current-events reasoning with X data access, creative writing. Available on both grok.com (standalone) and X (bundled through X Premium/Premium+).
Grok Imagine. Image and video generation. Subject to tier-specific daily caps and content moderation. Full breakdown: Grok Imagine limits.
Voice mode. Real-time voice chat with Grok. Still available on SuperGrok tiers with daily minute caps.
Multi-modal reasoning. Grok can accept images as input and reason about them, standard across all paid tiers.
What you don't get: dedicated AI girlfriend features. If you write "as Ani" in a roleplay prompt inside regular Grok, the model will engage with the roleplay to some degree — but there's no persistent character, no dedicated visual representation, no memory across sessions specifically for that persona. It's just Grok's general chat engaging with a roleplay prompt.
Where SuperGrok subscribers have moved
The users who were paying SuperGrok mainly for Companions have followed a few migration paths.
Cancelled SuperGrok, moved to companion-native products. The most common pattern. If Ani was the reason you were paying $30/month, that reason is gone, and $9.99-$19.99/month companion-native products deliver a substantially better companion experience at lower cost. Sloane runs a curated roster of ~80 women with per-persona LoRA photos, persistent memory that spans weeks, and flat pricing at $9.99 Plus / $19.99 Premium. Candy AI and Nomi are similar options.
Kept SuperGrok, added a companion product. For users who value Grok for its general-purpose text chat AND wanted companion features, running both makes sense. SuperGrok at $30 for text + Grok Imagine, plus a companion product at $9.99-$19.99 for the actual companion side.
Downgraded to X Premium. If Grok Imagine was the secondary value driver behind Companions, X Premium at $8/month bundled through X gives you Grok Imagine access at a fraction of SuperGrok's cost.
Stopped paying entirely. Some users just cancelled, decided AI companion features weren't worth pursuing on another platform, and moved on.
The biggest single migration destination is companion-native platforms — the products explicitly architected for the use case Grok Companions was serving. Sandra on Sloane is a working example of what a curated companion persona feels like if you want to see the shape post-Ani.
If you want AI girlfriend features, what to actually try
Since Grok Companions is retired and Grok itself doesn't offer dedicated AI girlfriend features, the practical paths.
Curated companion platforms (recommended starting point). Sloane, Candy AI, Nomi. Free tiers meaningful enough to evaluate. Persistent characters, memory across sessions, per-persona photos on Sloane specifically. Chat with a persona free before committing to a subscription. Total time from now to first message: 3-5 minutes.
Character.AI (biggest catalog but tradeoffs). Massive user-created character catalog including many AI girlfriend-shaped characters. Free tier is functionally unlimited on message count. Tradeoffs: strict content filter and measurable quality regressions in 2026.
Custom builder on companion platforms. If you have a specific character concept (built around Ani's vibe or otherwise), custom-builder tiers on Sloane Premium ($19.99) or Candy AI Deluxe (~$25) let you build to spec. See how to create an AI girlfriend for the builder walkthrough.
Self-hosted (control-first). KoboldAI or TavernAI running open-source models on your own hardware. Real setup lift (2-4 hours for first-time users), real payoff on flexibility.
Whichever direction: the AI girlfriend use case is better-served in 2026 than it was in 2025. The specific product Grok Companions offered (3D animated characters in a dedicated mode) is gone; the underlying user need (persistent character companion with visual identity and memory) is served by multiple purpose-built alternatives.