Employees at Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI reportedly had to sign away the rights to their own faces and voices to help train the company’s next generation of chatbots — including a sexually suggestive virtual companion named “Ani.”

The demand, part of a confidential initiative called “Project Skippy,” required workers to grant xAI “a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, sub-licensable, royalty-free license” to use, reproduce and distribute their biometric data, according to internal documents reviewed by the Wall Street Journal.

Most of the affected employees were so-called “AI tutors,” staff who work on the large language models that power xAI’s flagship chatbot, Grok.

At an April meeting led by company lawyer Lily Lim, employees were told xAI needed authentic human

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