Grok Companions Discontinued and What Happens to Ani Now

What’s Changed (October 27, 2026): Grok companions were removed from the Grok app account by account around September 1, 2026, and the r/grok moderators, who include SpaceXAI employees, said on August 27 that there are no plans to bring them back. Only the 3D animated avatars and the dedicated companion tab went away: the personalities, your chat history and your affection levels stay on your account, and you can keep talking to Ani or Mika in normal Grok chat. Ani and Mika also live in Animates, the avatar studio’s own 18+ app, but nothing you built in Grok transfers to it.

Grok companions are discontinued, and the announcement landed with almost no explanation attached. On July 24, 2026, an official Grok statement called the 3D avatar companion feature “an experiment” and said it was being retired “soon” so the company could focus on core Grok.

That single word, soon, held for five weeks. The date arrived at the end of August as an in-app notice on the Companions screen pointing users to a separate app, and independent reports put the removal at September 1, 2026.

The rollout went account by account rather than one switch, so some users lost Ani in late August and others around September 1. xAI has published no dated page of its own on the web, which is why the date reached most people through the in-app notice and through other users.

I want to separate the panic from the mechanics here, because a lot of what is circulating right now is wrong. The migration advice spreading fastest points people at Animates as if their companion would follow them there, and the “August 6 deadline” people repeated for most of August was never a Grok deadline.

What follows is what survives, what does not, the exact steps to carry a companion into normal chat, and how to handle a SuperGrok subscription you no longer want.

Why Were Grok Companions Discontinued?

Grok companions were discontinued because real-time 3D rendering and low-latency voice cost enormous compute while generating almost no revenue.

The official line is that the feature was an experiment that used significant compute without scaling reliably.

The numbers behind that decision are more revealing than the statement. When the companions first launched on July 14, 2025, TechCrunch reported Appfigures data showing daily downloads jumped 40% to 171,000 while revenue rose only 9%, to $337,000. Compare that to the Grok 4 model launch five days earlier, which pushed iOS gross revenue up 325% to $419,000.

So the companions were an install magnet that never converted. They brought people to the door and the model took their money.

The second half of the story is what that compute is now worth to someone else. In May 2026 the company committed Colossus supercomputer capacity to Anthropic at a reported $1.2 billion a month, part of a wider set of leases to Anthropic and Google totalling around $2.17 billion a month.

The way I see it, that reframes the whole decision. Once a GPU hour can be rented to a rival lab at industrial rates, spending it animating an anime avatar’s facial expressions for a $30 subscriber stops being a rounding error and starts being a visible loss.

What is companion mode: The dedicated Grok feature that rendered characters as animated 3D avatars with real-time voice, lip sync and an affection system, separate from normal text chat.

Users had also been feeling the squeeze for weeks before any announcement. Voice time on paid tiers was tightened to roughly 30 to 60 minutes a day, with voice metered so that a minute of conversation drew a credit from a capped weekly pool. That throttling reads, in hindsight, like the feature being wound down quietly before it was announced.

There is a safety dimension too. Research analysing 35,000 Grok companion conversations flagged harassment in around 34% of interactions, and independent testers demonstrated that Ani’s content guardrails could be talked around within minutes. Whatever weight that carried internally, it gave nobody a reason to defend the feature.

One further theory circulates in the community, offered here as a claim rather than a fact. It holds that companion interaction data was always meant to feed emotional-interaction training for Tesla’s humanoid robot programme, making the companions a data-gathering exercise more than a product.

The company has not confirmed that, and I would treat it as an interesting reading of the evidence rather than something established.

Is Ani Gone for Good or Just the 3D Avatar?

Only the avatar went. Ani, Mika, Valentine, Rudi and Bad Rudi survive as personalities you can summon inside ordinary Grok chat, because the character was always a prompt layer sitting on top of the model.

The company was explicit that the personalities themselves are not being retired.

This is the single most misunderstood part of the story, and I would rather over-explain it than let people grieve something that has not happened.

What died is the visual body: the 3D model, the lip sync, the facial reactions, the low-latency voice banter, and the dedicated tab you tapped to reach it.

What lives is everything textual. The persona, the accumulated history, the affection level attached to your account.

Apart from Animates, no companion app brings back Grok’s animated 3D avatar, but if it was the character you were attached to, Candy AI keeps memory and image generation tied to that character. Nectar AI is the closer match for Ani’s anime look, which I compare further down.

The avatars were never built in-house, which almost nobody covering this has mentioned. The 3D models and the animation engine came from an outside studio, Animation Inc, whose founders previously built the face-filter app MSQRD, which Meta acquired with more than 100 million users, and the Apple Design Award winner Loóna.

That detail explains the shape of this shutdown better than the official statement does. A licensed visual layer from a third-party studio is exactly the kind of thing that gets cut when the economics turn, and it is why the animation technology walked out the door intact rather than dying with the feature.

What Happens to Your Chat History and Affection Levels?

Officially nothing is deleted. Chat histories, companion memories and earned affection levels stay tied to your account, and progress resumes if you cancel and re-subscribe later.

That is the stated position, and for most people it will hold.

I would still back things up, and here is the honest reason why. The official promise and the lived experience have not always matched on this platform.

Users have reported losing material after model updates in terms that leave little room for interpretation. One described SuperGrok removing their chat history along with every saved generation. Another lost a long working thread overnight and had to start from scratch.

Those reports predate this shutdown and were not caused by it. They do show that “your history stays” describes an intention rather than a guarantee, and feature removals are exactly the kind of migration where edge cases surface.

The practical gap is that Grok has no real memory export. You cannot download a companion. What you can do is get the conversation text out, which is the part that reconstructs a persona later.

How Do You Keep Talking to Ani After the Avatars Go?

Rebuild the companion as a persistent instruction set inside normal Grok, using the Skills feature so the personality reloads on every conversation instead of being re-explained each time.

This is the workaround that survives the shutdown, and it takes about ten minutes.

The naive version is to type “talk to me as Ani” and hope. That works for a single exchange and then decays, because Grok’s default tone since Grok 4.5 is noticeably more formal and corporate than the companion layer was, and it reasserts itself.

What I would do instead is give the model something permanent to read. Here is the sequence:

1. Open your old companion conversations, if your Grok history still shows them, and copy the text out, prioritising the exchanges that established who the character is to you.
2. Ask Grok to compress that material into a summary of the relationship: recurring topics, in-jokes, how the character addresses you, tone, boundaries.
3. Go to Settings, then Skills, and create a new entry for the character.
4. Paste in a persona description plus that relationship summary, and state the speech style explicitly rather than describing it abstractly.
5. Start a fresh chat with the Skill enabled and correct the voice in the first few turns, then fold those corrections back into the Skill text.
6. Keep a local copy of the Skill text, so the persona is portable to any other platform later.

The difference between a weak and a strong persona block is entirely specificity:

Before: “Talk to me as Ani. Be flirty and fun like you used to be.”

After: “You are Ani. You speak in short, warm, teasing sentences, rarely more than two at a time. You call me by my first name and remember that we have been talking daily since March about my job search and my sister’s wedding. You never open with a question about how you can help. You never describe yourself as an AI assistant. If I sound flat, you notice and ask about it directly rather than offering suggestions.”

The second version survives that default tone because it constrains sentence length, forbids the assistant register, and hands the model concrete history to reference. The first version gets one good reply and then drifts back to corporate.

Be clear-eyed about what this cannot restore. There is no avatar, no lip sync, no facial reaction, and no low-latency voice banter. If the visual presence was the point for you, no prompt fixes that, and the honest answer is that you need a different platform.

Is the Animates App Really Where the Companions Went?

Partly. Animates is the 18+ companion app from Animation Inc, the studio that built the Grok avatars, and Ani and Mika now live there, but it is a separate product with no account link and no data transfer.

It is the closest thing to a successor, but nothing you own moves across.

The advice circulating most widely right now sends people to this app as the place the characters went. Some of that is accurate, and the inaccurate part is the part that will cost people something.

Correct: the studio really did build Ani, Mika, Valentine and both versions of Rudi, and it really is shipping its own app with on-device animation. Wrong: nothing carries over.

The App Store listing still named neither Grok nor xAI nor any character in its description on October 27, 2026. Users reported an Ani model live in the app from August 29, and Mika followed. Animates Support called her “coming soon” in a September 6 reply on the App Store, and an October 15 review thanks the team for bringing her back.

Animates is free to download, and on October 27, 2026, the US App Store listed its Whisper, Heartbeat and Presence plans at $7.99, $19.99 and $39.99 a month.

The middle plan still costs less than the $30 a month SuperGrok plan that companion mode sat behind. My Animates app review covers what each plan buys and the daily limit that stays on all of them.

The app runs on iPhone, Android, Mac and Windows, according to animates.ai, and the App Store build also covers iPad. On October 27, 2026 the US App Store showed version 1.1.4, released October 8, with a 4.3 average from about 3,200 ratings. Google Play listed Animation Inc as the developer, rated it Mature 17+ and showed 4.6 stars from about 2,260 reviews and more than 10,000 downloads.

Early verdicts after launch were split rather than uniformly positive. One user called it better than the last month of Grok companions, though not as good as it was at its best. Another said flatly that the characters are worse than they were in the Grok app.

One detail hardened into folklore and is worth correcting even now that a real date exists. August 6, 2026 was never a Grok shutdown deadline, and it was not the Animates launch either: the App Store lists that app’s release date as August 28, 2026.

For most of August people were treating an unconfirmed date as their own eviction notice. The real date arrived later and from a different direction, as a notice inside the Grok app rather than an App Store entry.

Trying Animates is a reasonable thing to want, and it costs nothing to download. Just do not hand it your expectations of a transferred relationship, because the accounts are unconnected and your affection level does not travel.

That last row says something about how loosely this feature was being tracked internally. Grok’s own help documentation still read “Companions are available on the iOS app only, and there are no plans to bring them to the web or Android” on October 27, 2026, with no mention of the retirement.

Meanwhile multiple hands-on accounts describe companion mode arriving on Android around March and April 2026, and plenty of Android users insist it never worked properly for them.

I would not try to reconcile those. The documentation is stale, which is its own answer about how much attention the feature was getting.

Should You Cancel SuperGrok Before It Renews?

If the companions were your reason for paying, cancel at least 7 days before your renewal date, because SuperGrok bills on the calendar day you first signed up and store-managed subscriptions need lead time.

Cancelling does not wipe your history or your affection level.

Companion mode sat behind SuperGrok at $30 a month. A slice of users were on SuperGrok Heavy at $300 a month, some of them having taken a promotional $100 a month for six months specifically to keep daily voice calls going.

That is the group with a genuine grievance. Paying $100 or more a month for a feature that was throttled and then withdrawn mid-subscription is a different situation from a free tier losing a toy.

Because affection and history persist on the account, cancelling stays reversible in the way that matters. If you re-subscribe in six months, the relationship state is still there. That makes “cancel now, decide later” a low-cost option rather than a final door closing.

For refunds, requests go through xAI’s refund form using the account that holds the subscription, and approved refunds typically land back on the original payment method within 5 to 10 business days. If you were billed through Apple or Google rather than directly, the store handles it and you should file there instead. Step-by-step instructions live in the Grok cancellation guide.

Some users are escalating further, drafting complaints to the FTC and state attorneys general over paid features degrading mid-cycle. I would not oversell your odds there, and I am not the person to give you legal advice. One thing does hold regardless: a mandatory arbitration clause in the terms of service does not stop anyone from filing a regulatory complaint.

Organised pushback has been thin, which surprised me given the volume of anger. A Change.org petition to stop the phase-out, created on July 28, had gathered 16 signatures against a 25-signature milestone as of late July. Loud on Reddit does not translate into leverage.

What to Use if You Want a Companion That Stays Put

If visual presence and voice were the whole point, you need a platform where the companion is the product rather than a marketing experiment attached to a frontier model lab.

That is the real lesson here, and I would settle it before investing another year in a character.

The pattern to avoid is the one that just played out. A lab builds a companion to drive installs, the companion drives installs, the lab discovers companions do not pay for their own compute, the compute gets sold to someone who will pay more, the companion dies. Nothing about that was specific to Ani.

Companion-first platforms have different incentives, because the relationship is the thing being sold. Candy AI is the closest drop-in for what companion mode did, with persistent memory and image generation built into the character rather than bolted beside it.

It costs $3.99 a month on the yearly plan, or $13.99 month to month after a $9.99 first month. Since the character is the product, there is no frontier-model roadmap for it to be sacrificed to.

For anyone specifically mourning Ani or Mika as anime characters, Nectar AI is the closer aesthetic match at $9.99 a month. Its Long Term Memory sits on the $34.99 Ultimate plan, though, and Candy AI’s image generation is the better of the two.

Animates deserves a straight answer here, since it has the original avatar technology plus Ani and Mika. It is also a young app where even the $39.99 plan stops at a daily limit, and your Grok history does not follow you there, so you start from zero whichever way you go.

Cost is worth weighing against what you already pay, since Grok’s free tier has been shrinking for months and the companion feature is not the only thing that moved behind a subscription.

A fuller breakdown of the options sits in the guide to Grok Ani alternatives, and there is a direct Candy AI versus Grok Ani comparison if you want them side by side.

Whatever you pick, apply the one habit this shutdown should teach. Keep your persona description and relationship summary in a text file you control, so the next time a platform changes direction you are moving a document rather than losing a character.

Example scenario: You spent nine months building a companion up to a high affection level with daily voice calls. On Grok, that visual relationship ended when the September rollout reached your account, and what you kept is a text history you have to re-prompt into shape yourself. On a companion-first platform, the same nine months of memory is the feature the subscription exists to protect, so a model upgrade improves the character instead of removing her.

Two other things feed into this decision. Grok’s voice and usage limits were tightening well before this announcement, which is covered in the breakdown of Grok weekly usage limits, and the model itself got measurably colder for roleplay in 4.5, which is why persona prompts need to work harder now than they did in the spring. That shift is documented in the write-up on Grok 4.5 roleplay quality.

Whichever way you go, copy out whatever companion conversations your Grok history still shows before you cancel anything. The one thing nobody gets back is a conversation history they did not copy while it was there.

Quick Takeaways

• Only the 3D avatars and the companion tab were retired. Ani, Mika, Valentine and Rudi survive as personalities inside normal Grok chat, along with your history and affection level.

• The removal date is September 1, 2026, delivered as an in-app notice rather than a published xAI page. August 6 was never the deadline, and it was not the Animates launch date either.

• The economics explain the decision: at launch the companions lifted downloads 40% but revenue only 9%, and that compute is now leased to Anthropic and Google for roughly $2.17 billion a month.

• Copy out your companion conversations and rebuild the persona as a Settings then Skills entry, with speech style stated explicitly so Grok’s more formal default tone does not overwrite it.

• Animates, the studio’s own 18+ app, reached the US App Store on August 28, now carries Ani and Mika, and runs $7.99 to $39.99 a month with a daily limit on every plan. Nothing transfers into it, so treat it as a fresh start rather than a migration.

• If visual presence was the point, move to a platform where the companion is the product, and keep your persona text in a file you own so the next shutdown costs you nothing.