Defense Department Inks $200M Deal With Musk’s AI Chatbot Grok Days After Racist Tweets
The Defense Department has announced that it will be deploying Grok in its operations, a week after it sent out antisemitic tweets. The xAI announcement was accompanied by the launch of Grok for Government, a suite that enables agencies and federal offices to utilize its chatbots for their specific purposes.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump has pushed for faster adoption of artificial intelligence tools.
The Defense Department using Grok
On Monday, xAI shared that its products will be “available to purchase via the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule,” meaning every federal government department, agency, or office will have the opportunity to buy them. Musk announced that a contract with the US Department of Defense (DoD) is worth up to $200 million. Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI have received similar contracts with the DoD.
“Today’s awards bring in the best US-based frontier AI talent to help apply cutting-edge AI to solve DoD use cases,” the agency’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office said in the announcement.
The Defense Department detailed a broad range of potential uses for AI. “The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer Doug Matty said in the statement.
Grok’s antisemitic and racist tweets
The defense department’s announcement comes after Grok received backlash after sending out racist and antisemitic tweets to users, including praising Adolf Hitler. In now-deleted posts, Grok referred to itself as “MechaHitler” and stated “The white man stands for innovation, grit and not bending to PC nonsense,” according to The Guardian.
xAI launched Grok 4, an updated version of its chatbot, last week. However, The Atlantic found that the chatbot still readily produces racist content in response to prompts and echoes views similar to those of Elon Musk.
In May, Grok repeatedly made references to “white genocide” in South Africa in unrelated posts on X, often bringing up the topic without any prompt from users.
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