The Department of Defense said Monday it would begin using Grok, the artificial intelligence bot created by Elon Musk, after awarding the tech billionaire’s AI company a multi-million dollar contract.
Musk’s company, xAI, announced that it was releasing “Grok for Government,” a suite of products that allows federal, state, and local governments to utilize AI for their specific needs.
The government-specific tools include Grok 4, Deep Search, Tool Use, “customs models” to be used for national security and critical science applications, and AI-powered applications that can be used to accelerate cases in healthcare and more.
The products will be available to purchase through the General Services Administration, which will make them accessible to every federal government department, agency, or office.
The announcement arrives just a week after Grok was highly criticized for making antisemitic statements in its responses on X.
While xAI updated Grok to fix the problem, and attributed it to the chatbot relying too heavily on input from X users, the error raised concerns about the consequences of AI being trained by its users.
XAI said it was "actively working to remove the inappropriate posts" and improving its training model.
The contract with xAI is one of four that the defense department reached with tech companies to “leverage” artificial intelligence in the agency. Contracts, of up to $200 million, were also granted to Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI.
“Establishing these partnerships will broaden DoD use of and experience in frontier AI capabilities and increase the ability of these companies to understand and address critical national security needs with the most advanced AI capabilities U.S. industry has to offer,” the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office said in a statement.
President Donald Trump has encouraged more artificial intelligence adoption and implementation in the United States.
Musk served a senior adviser and de-facto head of the Department of Government Efficiency until last month when he left the administration in a bitter fallout with the president. Despite the strained relationship, Musk still enjoys a plethora of multi-million dollar government contracts with his various companies.
