Is xAI a competitor worth worrying about?

They make good models, at times SotA (at least if you don't need coding, their last good coding model was six months ago), with lower safeguards than either Anthropic or OpenAI, and they still fail to capture meaningful market share or mind share. The name Grok is tainted by the twitter bot of the same name operated by xAI/X. Being owned by Musk lets the company appear unstable and untrustworthy in the minds of many. Their marketing game is just bad all around. They struggle to retain top talent.

Maybe their next model will be great. I doubt it will matter. I doubt xAI siphoning off Anthropic models and distilling that would matter. Model performance is not the main factor dragging down xAI

Theft of trade secrets. And so many people will have to be involved that evidence of the crime is bound to leak out.

Pretty sure models are encrypted all the way.