A week after Grok’s antisemitic outburst, which included praise of Hitler and a post calling itself “MechaHitler,” Elon Musk’s xAI has landed a US military contract worth up to $200 million. xAI announced a “Grok for Government” service after getting the contract with the US Department of Defense.
The military’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) yesterday said that “awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI—each with a $200M ceiling—will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of US frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas.” While government grants typically take many months to be finalized, Grok’s antisemitic posts didn’t cause the Trump administration to change course before announcing the awards.
The US announcement didn’t include much detail but said the four grants “to leading US frontier AI companies [will] accelerate Department of Defense (DoD) adoption of advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges.” The CDAO has been talking about grants for what it calls frontier AI since at least December 2024, when it said it would establish “partnerships with Frontier AI companies” and had identified “a need to accelerate Generative AI adoption across the DoD enterprise from analysts to warfighters to financial managers.”