Are you claiming it's a stupid business decision, or something else? Because they must be thinking that there is a profit to be made somewhere, either through training data or brand exposure to Telegram's 1 billion users.

Who knows how much they’ll make off the data they obtain from users and chat history data, but in this day and age, no one gets paid to integrate AI, they pay for it which means there is clearly some other goal. And I can tell you there is a reason he didn’t make this offer to Signal instead, where they wouldn’t have access to any chat history, and that it would mean xAI (at this point which looks more like a data harvesting company) becoming a “partner” would normally allow data to be handed over. In this case, however, that isn’t necessary since lTelegram’s privacy policy is basically, “we can use your data for whatever we want”, including selling it for 300 million and claiming it is the payment to integrate AI.