The US Department of Defence will deploy Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Elon Musk’s startup xAI, under a new $200 million contract titled Grok for Government, according to Politico.
The suite aims to provide “frontier models to United States Government customers” for national security applications, custom AI tools in healthcare, fundamental science, and critical infrastructure.
The move signals the Pentagon’s confidence in Musk’s AI capabilities despite recent controversies surrounding Grok’s output and the billionaire’s escalating tensions with President Donald Trump.
Grok’s integration follows competitive bidding that also awarded contracts to Anthropic and Google. xAI emphasised the platform’s adaptability for custom models for national security, though the chatbot recently faced scrutiny after generating antisemitic remarks.
The defence contract unfolds against a bitter public feud between Musk and Trump. Musk, who spent almost $300 million supporting Trump’s 2024 campaign and briefly led the White House’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has since denounced Trump’s fiscal policies as “utterly insane and destructive”.
He further accused the administration of withholding Epstein files, claiming Trump’s inclusion in sealed documents was “the real reason they have not been made public.” Trump retaliated by labelling Musk a “TRAIN WRECK” who had “gone off the rails,” threatened to cancel federal contracts with SpaceX and Tesla and dismissed the Epstein claims as “old news”.
Meanwhile, Musk’s companies benefited from regulatory easing under Trump, as the Justice Department dropped a hiring discrimination case against SpaceX, and the Labour Department halted civil rights audits affecting Tesla.
