Elon Musk\u2019s xAI has signed an important new customer: the U.S. government.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The two-year old AI company<\/a>\u2014most recently in the news when its chatbot praised Hitler\u2014said in a blog post<\/a> Monday that it has launched a new division, called \u201cGrok with Government\u201d and signed a contract worth up to $200 million with the Department of Defense. xAI also announced that it had been added to the General Services Administration schedule, meaning that xAI products will now be available for purchase across every government office and agency.<\/p>\n xAI\u2019s new DoD contract is part of a new effort to develop AI agent workflows across a \u201cvariety of mission areas,\u201d the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office said in a press release, without giving many more specifics. Google<\/a>, OpenAI, and Anthropic were also awarded up to $200 million contracts as part of the new effort, according to the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. A number of tech companies, including Meta<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, and Google, have either started working with or upped their work with the U.S. government in the last year as the taboo in Silicon Valley of working with the Defense Department has fallen away.<\/p>\n xAI\u2019s new ties with the Pentagon are likely to raise eyebrows, not least because just one week earlier, the company released an update to its Grok AI model that caused it to spew racist comments, including referring to itself as a \u201cMechaHitler.\u201d<\/a> There\u2019s also the fact that xAI\u2019s CEO, Musk, has spent the last six months trying to trim \u201cwasteful spending\u201d <\/a>in the government via the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). DOGE claims to have saved $190 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars by July\u2014in large part via cutting government contracts it said were outdated or wasteful (DOGE reportedly hasn\u2019t provided documentation or evidence for 40% of those cuts, and investigations<\/a> and analysis into the cuts have suggested that these figures have been greatly exaggerated.) Now, xAI is vying to get the U.S. government to add many more contracts that could cost hundreds of millions of dollars.<\/p>\n Another twist is that the Grok announcement comes at a time when existing government contracts at Musk\u2019s various companies appear to be on thin ice.<\/a> In June, amid the very-public social media spat between Musk and Trump that began with Musk\u2019s criticisms<\/a> of Trump\u2019s \u201cBig Beautiful Bill,\u201d Trump threatened to cut all of Musk\u2019s government contracts across his various companies. Musk, in turn, had suggested he would decommission SpaceX\u2019s Dragon capsule, currently the primary way for NASA to shuttle astronauts to the International Space Station and back to Earth. Musk\u2019s companies have notched more than $38 billion<\/a> in contracts with the U.S. government over the years.<\/p>\n xAI says that it wants to start servicing federal, local, state, and national security customers, and that, for these customers, it would start to build custom models for national security or \u201ccritical science\u201d applications that would be available in \u201cclassified and other restricted environments\u201d and that it would provide specific engineering support with USG-cleared engineers.<\/p>\n While Musk is no longer working with DOGE, he remains well-connected in some government circles. One of his allies within the Trump Administration was Katie Miller, who had served as Mike Pence\u2019s press secretary when he was vice president during Trump\u2019s first presidency. Miller is also the wife of Stephen Miller, Trump\u2019s deputy chief of staff for policy, and she has since started working for xAI<\/a> since Musk left DOGE. On Monday, Miller was promoting xAI\u2019s new government plans on her social media account, saying that Grok was the \u201conly truth-seeking AI available to the US Government.\u201d<\/p>\n xAI and the Department of Defense did not respond to requests for comment. GSA said it was working with \u201cseveral\u201d AI solutions across various agencies and that it welcomes \u201call American companies and models who abide by our terms and conditions.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk\u2019s xAI has signed an important new customer: the U.S. government.\u00a0 The two-year old AI company\u2014most recently…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":66697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[738,64,20272,66,2527,1595,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-66696","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-department-of-defense","11":"tag-elon-musk","12":"tag-spacex","13":"tag-startups","14":"tag-united-states","15":"tag-unitedstates","16":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114855531228740858","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}