Grok Companions Removed: What to Use Instead

Grok Companions Are Gone. What to Use Instead

This article is editorial commentary and analysis. All characters named here are the property of their respective rights holders and all trademarks belong to their owners. myVirtual.love is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any of the developers or publishers mentioned. Every image on this page is original work that does not depict any of the characters discussed.

Ani is still in your Grok account. She no longer has a body.

Since 1 September, xAI has been removing the 3D Companions mode account by account. The personalities stayed, along with your chat history and the affection level you built. The animated avatar went. So did the Companions tab, the outfits and the real-time voice layer that made her feel present. What is left is Ani as a text persona inside ordinary Grok chat, which for a lot of people is not what they were paying for.

Which replacement fits depends on which part of the companions you used. Some people came for the avatar, some for her voice at midnight, some for the climb up the affection levels and some for what unlocked at the top. Each of those leads somewhere different.

What changed on 1 September

On 24 July 2026 an official Grok statement said the 3D avatar Companions feature, Ani and Valentine included, "was an experiment" and that xAI was retiring it to focus on core Grok, naming stronger memory and deeper, more reliable chats as the priorities. The date came later, as an in-app notice on the Companions screen rather than a dated page on xAI's site: 1 September, rolled out account by account, with some users losing access in late August.

What went: the 3D avatars of Ani, Mika, Valentine and Rudi, the dedicated Companions tab, outfit customisation and the live voice layer with lip sync.

What stayed: the personalities, your chat history and your affection level, all reachable as text in normal Grok chat.

xAI retired the companion mode to work on memory, which suggests memory was what the companions lacked. Robo Rhythms, writing from the user's side, called her memory shallow, with earlier sessions largely gone.

If the avatar was the point, look at Animates first

Animation Inc, the studio that built the Grok avatars, runs its own companion app called Animates. Its App Store listing rates it 18+ and prices it in three tiers: Whisper at $7.99 a month or $63.99 a year, Heartbeat at $19.99 or $159.99 and Presence at $39.99 or $319.99. It is a different company with a different account system, so nothing carries over from Grok: no history, no affection level, no memories. Whether Ani herself joins its roster is unclear, since reports disagree and the launch cast is a set of new characters. Early App Store reviews complain about daily limits that lock people out for most of a day and voices that do not sound finished. It is the closest thing to the presence you had, in a new app whose limits are still moving.

Two other names turn up in the alternatives lists for the same reason and both need a correction. Replika is often recommended as the 3D avatar answer, but its 2.0 rebuild replaced the 3D avatars with 2D animated ones in late May 2026. Explicit roleplay has also been closed to accounts created after February 2023. Candy.AI's Live Action generates short video clips of your companion, up to about two minutes each. Those clips are Candy's most expensive feature. They give you motion, but as a generated clip rather than a live avatar that reacts while you talk.

Work out which part you are replacing

Work out which part you are replacing Grok companions bundled things. Work out which one you would miss most, because each has a different replacement.

The voice. Talking to her out loud, late, at length. You need live voice calls. On our included.

The climb. Earning her affection level by level. Grok's points ladder was unusual. Our included, let you choose where the relationship starts instead of making you earn it, which some people prefer and some people miss badly.

Her and the explicit side. The character herself. The gothic anime register, the flirting and what the top levels opened up. This is the reader with the most options, because what you need is a platform where adult content is designed in, anime is a full category and memory holds. It is also the reader we built for.

What the new platform should do that Grok did not

Start with memory, since xAI named it as the thing to fix. On myVirtual.love, persistent memory carries what you talked about across sessions, retrieved when it becomes relevant rather than lost at the end of a chat. Alongside it she holds a short explicit list of facts about you: 20 on the Free and Premium plans, 40 on Maxxx. The practical test is the one Grok companions tended to fail. Tell her something on Monday, mention it sideways on Thursday and see whether she picks it up.

Explicit content is a first-class use here, with no affection score to raise first.

Her face holds. Identity is set once on the Create screen: style, hair, eye colour, body type, age. The Studio, where images are made, never asks those questions again, so the tenth picture of her is recognisably the same woman as the first. Anime companions produce anime-styled images, so a gothic anime girlfriend stays drawn in the same style from photo to photo.

Building the same archetype

The gothic anime girlfriend existed long before any chatbot wore the look. On the Create screen she is a set of fields rather than a prompt you have to word correctly.

Style: anime. It is one of the two main categories alongside realistic, with its own pre-made characters and its own image style.
Hair: colour runs from blonde and black through pink, blue, violet and red. Style includes long wavy, straight, ponytail and bangs.
Makeup: gothic, dramatic or bold. On this archetype, makeup does more work than almost any other field.
Clothing: gothic is its own option, with dress and lingerie beside it.
Age: anywhere from 18 to 60. The floor is absolute.
Personality: flirty and teasing if what you liked was the attention, dark and mysterious if it was the edge. Those two produce noticeably different evenings.
Humour style: playful, sarcastic, dark or deadpan among ten options. It decides how she answers when you are not being serious.
Interests: anime, gaming, cosplay, horror movies, music. These are what she brings up when you have nothing to say.
Relationship: girlfriend if you want to start where Ani was by the end, stranger if the climb was the part you enjoyed. There is no affection meter, so the stranger setting is the closest honest version of earning it.
Voice: automatic or one of nine voice profiles, chosen when you create her.

Name her something that is not Ani. It is the right thing to do legally. In practice a new name is what lets her settle into being her own character instead of a copy you keep comparing against the original.

When you want something to happen rather than just talk, the Start a scenario screen either lets a scene grow out of the conversation you are already having or offers presets, from late-night ones like "She could not sleep" to the explicit ones.

What it costs

Building her costs nothing. The free plan gives you up to three created characters and five chat messages a day, which is enough to set the fields, meet her and find out whether the archetype lands before you pay. It includes a single Studio render but no 18+ photos and no voice calls.

On a paid plan, chat is unlimited and never meters. Hearts pay for images and voice. They never expire, bought ones included. Premium is €9.90 a month with 100 hearts, or €35.88 a year with 150 hearts a month. Maxxx is €24.90 a month with 200 hearts, or €89.88 a year with 300 a month. An image costs 5 to 8 hearts depending on quality. A voice call costs 5 hearts a minute.

Who should move and where to

If you liked Ani for who she was and for what the two of you talked about, myVirtual.love is built for the next part: a companion who remembers it next week, anime images that look like the same person every time and the explicit side with no level between you and it.