Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) company xAI has scored a contract for up to $200 million with the Department of Defense alongside three other major tech firms, the Pentagon announced Monday.
xAI, Anthropic, Google and OpenAI all received contracts with the same ceiling from the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office to help boost the agency’s adoption of advanced AI, according to a press release.
“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” Doug Matty, the Defense Department’s chief digital and AI officer, said in a statement.
The announcement comes the same day xAI unveiled a suite of AI products for U.S. government customers, which it refers to as Grok for Government.
xAI noted that its products will also be available to the rest of the federal government for purchase via the General Services Administration schedule.
“America is the world leader in AI, and this is in no small part due to a tradition of innovation and strong investments in engineering and science,” the company wrote in a news release Monday. “We’re excited to contribute back to the country that made xAI uniquely possible here.”
The contract follows a week of controversy for Musk’s AI firm, after an update caused its chatbot Grok to produce antisemitic responses. xAI ultimately deleted numerous incendiary posts and offered an apology for the chatbot’s “horrific behavior” over the weekend.
It suggested the “root cause” of the problem was “an update to a code path upstream” of the chatbot that was “independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.”
After xAI last week unveiled the newest version of its AI model, Grok 4, users also noticed it appeared to reference Musk’s views when responding to more controversial inquiries. Grok 4 is among the suite of products available to government customers.
