Washington DC – The Pentagon announced massive contracts on Monday with multiple leading US artificial intelligence firms, including Elon Musk‘s xAI, which is has been mired in scandal.
Each of the contracts to xAI, Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI have a ceiling value of $200 million, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office said in a statement.
The awards will enable the Department of Defense “to leverage the technology and talent of US frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas,” it said.
The contract with xAI comes just days after the company was forced to apologize again for pro-Nazi posts by its Grok chatbot.
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After an update on July 7, the chatbot praised Adolf Hitler in some responses on X, denounced “anti-white hate,” and described Jewish representation in Hollywood as “disproportionate.”
xAI apologized for the messages and claimed to have corrected the instructions that led to the incidents.
The release on Wednesday of Grok 4, the latest chatbot version, was immediately met with scrutiny after it appeared to check Musk’s positions on some questions it was asked before responding.
The contract between xAI and the Department of Defense comes even as the far-right billionaire and President Donald Trump have publicly feuded in recent weeks.
After leaving his role leading the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle large swathes of the administrative state, Musk turned on the Republican over his massive budget bill, which passed last week.
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The two former allies have since been engaged in a messy and very public breakup, taking place mainly on social media.
Meanwhile, Musk’s xAI announced on Monday the launch of a “Grok for Government” service, following a similar initiative by OpenAI.
In addition to the Pentagon contract, “every federal government department, agency, or office (can now) purchase xAI products” thanks to its inclusion on an official supplier list, the firm said.
