The U.S. Department of Defense today announced new contracts with top artificial intelligence firms in the U.S. in an effort to streamline AI’s move into military applications.
Contracts of up to $200 million will be granted to Google LLC, OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and, perhaps more surprisingly, Elon Musk’s xAI, whose Grok chatbot recently made headlines when it fell into hot water for promoting Nazi ideology. The DOD said each of the awards will address critical national security challenges.
“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 department explained in a press release.
The inclusion of xAI will perhaps raise some eyebrows, given the recent controversy over Grok’s seeming transformation into a quasi-fascist — apparently a result of engineers taking Musk’s anti-woke strategy a little too far. Moreover, it was only two weeks ago since President Trump was leveling threats at Musk, musing on his deportation after the two former allies had a well-publicized and somewhat confounding spat.
Today, xAI announced “Grok for Government,” which it called “a suite of products that make our frontier models available to United States Government customers.” This includes the DOD contract, as well as partnerships with other government departments, including the General Services Administration.
“Under the umbrella of Grok For Government, we will be bringing all of our world-class AI tools to federal, local, state, and national security customers,” the company said in a press release. “These customers will be able to use the Grok family of products to accelerate America, from making everyday government services faster and more efficient to using AI to address unsolved problems in fundamental science and technology.”
OpenAI’s inclusion doesn’t come as much of a surprise, with the company already working with the DOD to build AI for military applications, the two announcing a contract worth up to $200 million in June. Meta Platforms Inc., though left out of the new partnerships, is already working with the defense technology startup Anduril Industries Inc. to develop wearable devices for the U.S. military.
“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” said DOD Chief Digital and AI Officer Dr. Doug Matty. “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.”
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