Musk Says X Will Open Source Its New Algorithm

Elon Musk says his social media platform X will open its new algorithm to the public.

The change, set to happen six days from now, includes all code for organic and advertising post recommendations, Musk said in a post Saturday (Jan. 11) on the platform.

“This will be repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed,” the post said.

The announcement follows a decision last week by the European Commission (EC) to extend a retention order it had sent to Musk last year until the end of 2026. That order relates to algorithms and dissemination of illegal material.

“This is saying to a platform, keep your internal documents, don’t get rid of them, because we have doubts about your compliance … and we need to be able to have access to them if we request it explicitly,” EC spokesperson Thomas Regnier said last week in a news briefing.

Musk is under fire in the EU and elsewhere after the revelation that Grok, the chatbot behind his xAI startup, has been used to generate nonconsensual sexual images of women and children.

A report by Reuters noted that prosecutors in Paris last year investigated X for alleged algorithmic bias and fraudulent data extraction. The platform called this a “politically motivated criminal investigation” that threatens the free speech of its users.

X was also fined $140 million in December by the European Union, which said the company violated the Digital Services Act.

The EU says X had violated the law’s prohibition against deceptive design practices by selling a blue checkmark denoting users’ verified status without verifying who is behind an account.

It also accuses the company of breaching the DSA’s transparency and accessibility requirements by preventing the use of its ads repository by researchers who want to identify scams and other threats, and imposing “unnecessary barriers” to those researchers.

xAI announced last week that it had raised $20 billion in a Series E funding round to boost its effort to develop advanced artificial intelligence (AI). The company added that the new funds surpassed its target of $15 billion.

“This financing will accelerate our world-leading infrastructure buildout, enable the rapid development and deployment of transformative AI products reaching billions of users, and fuel groundbreaking research advancing xAI’s core mission: Understanding the Universe,” the company said in a news release