✈️❌🧠 Grok-Telegram Deal Fall Through Over User Data Concerns

Pavel Durov announced a partnership with xAI back in May 2025. Grok in Telegram was supposed to handle fact-checking and thread summaries, AI search, and chat moderation. Still, the collaboration did not happen.

Sources say the messenger also considered Perplexity and other startups as partners. Still, all negotiations reportedly hit a wall: the centralized nature of AI providers couldn't guarantee user data security.

Now, Telegram decided to build AI services based on its own decentralized (and encrypted) Cocoon network.

❓ But why announce the collaboration in the first place? Moreover, Durov said about the deal like it's already done—only xAI CEO Elon Musk shot it down.

Telegram's CEO later clarified that "formalities are pending," but that was where the partnership talk ended. And such a sensitive aspect of Telegram, user data storage, can hardly be classified as a "formality."

Do we even need AI features in Telegram?

❤️ — Yes, absolutely!
🔥 — No, they'll get in the way

@hiaimediaen