Exclusive: why the Telegram–Grok integration announced in 2025 never materialized

In 2025, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok was expected to be deeply integrated into Telegram, with the messenger set to receive $300 million and additional incentives. The integration never moved forward. Durov’s Code has learned what prevented the project from being launched.

According to our sources, Grok was not the only candidate for integration. Telegram also explored partnerships with Perplexity and several other AI companies (after being turned down by Telegram, Perplexity later signed a similar deal with Snapchat). In every case, discussions stalled on the same question: how to guarantee absolute privacy for Telegram users, without compromises or gray areas in how the AI operates.

In October last year, speaking at Blockchain Life 2025 in Dubai, Pavel Durov highlighted the rapid growth of AI bots on Telegram. He noted that chat is a natural interface for interacting with AI, and that Telegram has “the most powerful API,” making the expansion of AI services on the platform a logical development.

At the same time, Durov pointed out that most of these solutions rely on centralized AI providers, which gain access to user data and may use it in their own interests, not only for training models, but also for profiling and manipulation.

Awareness of these risks, combined with user resistance to sharing private messages and documents with third parties for AI-powered summaries, led to the idea of decentralized AI, a model in which computation and technology belong to people rather than corporations or governments.

We realized the world needs a decentralized approach to AI, a world where AI belongs not to corporations or governments, but to the people. That’s why we rolled up our sleeves and started to work on something big at the intersection of blockchain, AI, and social media. We’ve decided to build a decentralized network for AI features, for AI compute.

Ultimately, Telegram chose to abandon the idea of deep integration with a third-party AI service provider, even though the deal could have brought substantial funding for platform development. Sources say that protecting user data remains a top priority for Telegram, even if that means turning down high-profile AI partnerships and money.

Interest in AI tools has not disappeared, however, as demonstrated by the later launch of Cocoon. Any future AI features inside Telegram will only be implemented under a fully transparent and autonomous data-processing model, which Cocoon is designed to provide.

Instead of Grok, Telegram Bets on Cocoon

At stake in the original negotiations was $300 million in cash and stock, plus 50% of subscription revenue from xAI products sold via Telegram. Elon Musk initially denied that a deal had been finalized, while Telegram founder Pavel Durov said at the time that “the formalities are still pending.”

Since the announcement in May 2025, neither Durov nor Musk has publicly revisited the Grok integration. In the meantime, Telegram has advanced its own AI initiatives. In November, the company launched Cocoon, a decentralized network for processing AI workloads.

Durov has repeatedly emphasized that Cocoon enables confidential AI computation. By January 2026, the platform already supported message translation, AI-generated summaries of posts, and even summaries of web pages. Unlike potential integration with Grok, ChatGPT, or Perplexity, when using these features, users’ messages do not become accessible to third parties.