SpaceX's AI group has cut about 60 people from the team behind Grok Imagine, its image and video generator, according to a report from The Information on Friday — the sharpest cut yet to a product that, nine months ago, was one of xAI's flagship bets. The report says only a handful of staff remain to keep Imagine running, and that the group's weight is moving behind AI coding tools and Grok Bot, its agent product.

SpaceX has not confirmed the cuts. Imagine still works — for now, at least — and no shutdown has been announced. But the shape of the move is hard to miss: a video-generation team being wound down while the coding side of the house gets the people and the compute.

What changed#

The Information's report, summarized in its published summary and its post on X, says SpaceX's AI group — SpaceX Super Intelligence, the entity formed when SpaceX acquired xAI in February — has “axed most of the team behind Grok Imagine.” About 60 people who worked on the image and video generator were laid off in the past week. What remains is described as just a handful, to maintain the product.

Imagine is the image and video generation feature inside Grok, and it was one of xAI's most visible consumer products. The product has not been switched off: multiple reports note it remains available, and users posting on Reddit on Saturday said it was working for them. Some users have also reported the Imagine tab disappearing from Grok's sidebar since around November 12, with the Imagine web address now opening Grok's normal chat in image and video mode — a change that reads as a quiet demotion even if the feature itself still works.

A developer desk at night with code on one monitor and a friendly AI agent face on the other
Coding tools and agents are where SpaceX's AI group is putting its weight. Illustration: AI Frontier Post

The pivot: code and agents over video#

The throughline in the reporting is a reordering of priorities. The Information wrote on X that the cuts “signal a shift toward AI coding tools and agents as Chinese companies pull ahead in video generation.” The group's own newsroom tells the same story in miniature: of the 25 posts x.ai/news has published since its last Grok Imagine post on August 7, twelve are about Grok Bot — and none is about Imagine.

The coding push has a corporate tailwind. SpaceX's acquisition of the coding assistant Cursor earlier this year gives the coding bet a product to build around, and Grok Bot — the agent product built on the Grok chatbot — is where the group's public attention has gone. The reorganization that followed the xAI merger split the combined AI operation into focus areas including Coding and Imagine; the November cuts say which one is getting the resources.

There is also a performance argument. Independent benchmarks cited by The Information indicated Grok Imagine trailed leading competing models — a gap that makes a video team expensive to defend when rivals are pulling ahead. Cutting the team does not fix the gap, but it stops paying for a race the group no longer thinks it is winning.

A team that was already thinning#

The November cuts are not the first thinning. Since xAI was folded into SpaceX in February 2026 in a $250 billion all-stock transaction, the AI group has been reorganized and trimmed repeatedly. TechCrunch reported in May that more than 50 researchers and engineers had already left since the merger, including people tied to Imagine's leadership, Haotian Liu and Guodong Zhang.

For users, the decline has a longer arc. In the r/grok thread that carried the news on Saturday, longtime users described the original Imagine Pro 1.0 model from October 2025 as the best image-to-video model they had used — then said it went downhill from December 2025, a slide some described as a bait-and-switch. Whether or not that verdict is fair, it explains why the layoff news landed less as a shock than as confirmation of something users felt they had already watched happen.

A flown Dragon capsule hangs above a Falcon 9 landing leg inside SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California
A flown Dragon capsule hangs above a Falcon 9 landing leg inside SpaceX headquarters, Hawthorne, California. Photograph: Steve Jurvetson, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

What Reddit made of it#

The r/grok thread that carried the news — “IMAGINE TEAM LAID OFF,” posted at 6:04 a.m. EST on Saturday, with 120 upvotes and 70 comments by the time we read it — largely took the report at face value. No highly-upvoted comment disputed the layoffs. The thread itself carried the news as a screenshot of posts on X, including Grok's own reply attributing the figure of about 60 to The Information.

The top reactions split three ways: users calling for the release of, or a rollback to, Grok 4.1; users declaring Imagine finished; and users pointing out that open-source image generation has caught up — one commenter cited Krea 2 and H3 image as having passed Imagine Pro 1.0. The thread's own framing was a question, not a verdict: the poster asked whether Imagine would get worse, adding that it worked fine for them for now. Others argued the product still matters — one commenter called images Grok's revenue lifeblood and predicted Imagine would go into hibernation rather than be shut down. The disagreement is about the product's future, not about whether the cuts happened.

What to watch#

  • Whether Imagine gets a roadmap, a maintenance-only future, or a quiet wind-down — and whether the tab's disappearance is the first step.
  • Whether SpaceX confirms the cuts, and what it says about Imagine's future when it does.
  • Grok Bot: does the agent product justify the reallocation, or does the coding pivot spread the group thinner?
  • The video-generation race: with Chinese labs pulling ahead, does SpaceX's AI group re-enter video later, or cede the category?
  • Attrition: whether the handful left to maintain Imagine stay, or the team thins further.

Sources#

All five press reports draw on The Information's paywalled report by Aaron Tilley, Claudia Chong and Juro Osawa, “Elon Musk's AI Group Guts Grok Video Generation Team” (November 13, 2026). SpaceX has published no confirmation of its own.