The government is accelerating adoption of artificial intelligence technology, beginning with the U.S. Department of Defense using Grok, the AI chatbot embedded into X.
Elon Musk‘s startup xAI announced on Monday a $200 million government contract as the Defense Department aims to address national security concerns with AI technology. It’s also rolling out what it called “Grok for Government,” a suite of products that can be customized for specific uses across science and healthcare, among other things.
The partnership was unveiled on the heels of Grok last week launching into an antisemitic tirade after it was updated to reduce its reliance on mainstream media sources. In a June X post, Musk, who oversaw DOGE and is now on the outs with President Trump over his spending and tax bill, prompted users to reply with “divisive” and “politically incorrect” facts to train the chatbot.
Anthropic, Google and OpenAI were also tapped to receive awards, according to the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. “The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” said department chief Doug Matty in a statement. “Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems.”
“Grok for Government” will be available to federal, state, local and national security customers who will be able to use the technology to streamline certain processes and “address unsolved problems in fundamental science,” xAI said.
The government has been implementing a commercial-first approach to hastening AI adoption, with the Defense Department awarding similar contracts with OpenAI, Microsoft and Anthropic.
“These advanced AI solutions will enable the DoD to effectively address defense challenges and scale the adoption of agentic AI across enterprise systems to drive innovation and efficiency with agile, proven technology,” Jim Kelly, vice president of Federal Sales for Google Public Sector, wrote in a blog post. “This milestone demonstrates a strengthened partnership between Google Public Sector and DoD CDAO to accelerate the federal adoption of cutting-edge data, analytics, and AI.”