Elon Musk’s xAI Launches Grok Studio to Challenge ChatGPT With Split-Screen Collaboration

xAI released Grok Studio today, offering users a canvas-style interface for building apps, writing documents, and developing browser games. The new feature pits Elon Musk’s AI company directly against OpenAI’s ChatGPT Canvas and Anthropic’s Claude Artifacts in the competitive AI productivity space.

Grok Studio allows split-screen, real-time collaboration between users and the AI, enabling simultaneous work on various creative projects. The interface supports multiple programming languages including Python, JavaScript, and C++, with the ability to preview HTML snippets.

Beyond simply coding, Grok now features a “preview” tab to let users have a glimpse of what their HTML snippets, coding languages, and bash scripts generate. Everything happens inside of Grok’s native interface.

“Grok can now generate documents, code, reports, and browser games. Grok Studio will open your content in a separate window, allowing both you and Grok to collaborate on the content together,” xAI said in a tweet announcing the new feature.

We tested the new feature, and it appears well implemented, giving more prominence to the code than the prompt for better understanding of what is going on—unlike Claude, for example, which splits the screen in half.

Next to the code image there is a Preview button to let users see the final product generated after all their interactions.

The release comes two months after xAI launched Grok 3, continuing the company’s rapid expansion of AI capabilities since 2024. Grok Studio appears available to both free and paid users.

Another new feature announced by xAI was a Google Drive integration, letting users add documents, spreadsheets, and slide decks directly into prompts. This feature was first featured by Google in Gemini, with OpenAI quickly following suit and Anthropic adopting it later on.

The new feature is located in the prompt text box, similar to ChatGPT’s UI. The model is capable of understanding visual inputs like photos and charts, and is obviously capable of understanding the text on documents with different formats like .txt, .doc, and .rft, along with native Google Docs.

Grok Studio’s support for browser game development aligns with Musk’s previously stated intentions for xAI. In February, Musk noted plans to develop an AI game studio, with this new feature pointing that the company may be already pushing towards that direction by enabling collaborative development—or collaborative vibe coding, maybe?

The competitive AI productivity landscape continues to evolve rapidly, with each major player now offering features that make their models more compelling. Just this week, Anthropic announced web search and research capabilities, along with Gmail and calendar integration, while Google integrated its Veo2 video generator in Gemini, and OpenAI released o3 and o4-mini—its most powerful reasoning models.

Edited by Andrew Hayward