Elon Musk says X will open source its entire recommendation and advertising algorithm within days, aiming to boost transparency as scrutiny grows around AI-driven content ranking and platform governance.
Elon Musk has pledged to open source X’s recommendation algorithm within seven days, positioning the platform as the first major social network to publicly release the full code behind both content and advertising rankings.
The release will include all code used to determine which organic posts and sponsored advertisements are shown to users, alongside comprehensive developer notes. Musk said the process will be repeated every four weeks, with detailed documentation explaining each update.
“We will make the new algorithm, including all code used to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users, open source in 7 days. This will be repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed,” Musk wrote on X on January 10, 2026.
According to Musk, the move is designed to increase transparency and allow developers and researchers to better understand how content and ads are ranked. If fully delivered, it would represent one of the most detailed algorithm disclosures ever made by a major social media platform.
The new recommendation system reportedly relies heavily on Grok, xAI’s large language model, which analyses user interactions such as likes, reposts and viewing time to rank posts from roughly 100 million daily submissions. Musk has previously said X’s feed is becoming “purely AI”, with Grok driving ongoing improvements rather than manual engineering changes.
However, Musk’s transparency pledges have drawn scepticism. X last released portions of its feed-ranking logic in 2023, but that repository has not been meaningfully updated in three years. The renewed open source push also comes amid regulatory scrutiny of Grok’s image-generation features and broader concerns over AI accountability, platform governance and whether the published code will truly reflect X’s live systems.
