SpaceX’s AI unit is said to have cut about 60 people from the Grok Imagine team, leaving the video tool with only a skeleton crew

SpaceX’s artificial-intelligence group has all but emptied out the team behind Grok Imagine, its video and image generation tool. People familiar with the matter told The Information, a U.S. newsroom, that about 60 employees were cut in the past week and that only a small crew remains to keep the product running. The tool is still online and still usable. Without a dedicated development team, it is much less clear whether it will keep getting new versions.

The cuts sit inside a longer reshuffle. In February, SpaceX bought Elon Musk’s xAI in an all-stock deal valued at about $250 billion and folded the operation into a unit called SpaceX Super Intelligence. In August it spent $60 billion on Cursor, an AI coding startup in the United States. People familiar with the company’s plans said that after those deals, AI coding tools and the Grok Bot agent product were moved ahead of other lines. Generating video clips from text or stills takes far more computing power than handling text, a cost that has already forced other large U.S. developers to rethink whether they want to keep training their own video models.

The Information reported the layoffs on Nov. 13, 2026. IT Home in China followed at 22:30 Beijing time that night, and the Economic Observer at 23:59. The report said most of the Grok Imagine research and development staff were let go, that the product remains available to users, and that its future looks uncertain without a dedicated team. It also said independent benchmarks had Grok Imagine trailing leading rivals, weakening the case for heavy further investment. SpaceX and xAI have not issued a public statement on the cuts.

A useful comparison is a restaurant that shuts its most expensive, most labor-heavy grill station, leaves two people to mind the counter, and moves the cooks onto set meals that can be served faster to corporate clients. Video models consume a lot of computing power. Coding tools and software agents are easier to sell directly to companies. This is not the same as taking Grok Imagine offline. It is closer to removing most of the kitchen while the menu item stays listed, which usually means slower updates.

For the wider market, the report argued that the circle of major U.S. firms still training their own video models now mainly comes down to Google and Meta. The Information said ByteDance, Kuaishou and MiniMax in China still treat visual models as a core priority, describing ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5 as one of the industry’s benchmarks and noting that MiniMax’s open-source H3 has been adopted by U.S. startups. People who use Grok Imagine can still generate pictures and clips for now. How long the tool stays on that list will depend on whether the company keeps spending computing power on it.

Original publication time: The Information, Nov. 13, 2026 (Beijing date); IT Home, Nov. 13, 2026, 22:30 Beijing / 9:30 AM EST; Economic Observer, Nov. 13, 2026, 23:59 Beijing / 10:59 AM EST