Elon Musk’s Grok is now working with the US government; Pentagon awards mega contracts for new ‘frontier AI’ projects

xAI, the artificial intelligence company led by Elon Musk, announced new efforts Monday to get its generative AI tool, Grok, into the hands of federal government officials. In a post to X, the company announced “Grok for Government,” which it described as a suite of products aimed at U.S. government customers. FedScoop reported on the General Services Administration’s interest in Grok last week. xAI disclosed two new government partnerships: a new contract with the Defense Department, which we’ll get to in a moment, and that the tool was available to purchase through GSA. “This allows every federal government department, agency, or office, to purchase xAI products,” the post added. “We’re hiring mission driven engineers who want to join the cause.” The new products from xAI follow the introduction of government-specific AI intelligence platforms from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. The announcement was made just days after xAI’s formal apology for the chatbot’s recent antisemitic outputs. Last Thursday, FedScoop reported that government coders at GSA were discussing, on GitHub, incorporating Grok into a testing sandbox associated with a yet-to-launch tool called AI.gov and GSAi, a GSA-created AI platform. Anthropic, Google and xAI will join OpenAI on the CDAO’s nascent effort to partner with industry on pioneering artificial intelligence projects focused on national security applications. Under the individual contracts — each worth up to $200 million — the Pentagon will have access to some of the most advanced AI capabilities developed by the four companies, including large language models, agentic AI workflows, cloud-based infrastructure and more. Chief Digital and AI Officer Doug Matty said in a statement: “The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries. 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.” OpenAI received the first contract for the effort June 17 and will create prototypes of agentic workflows for national security missions. According to CDAO, work with all four vendors will expand the Pentagon’s experience with emerging AI capabilities, as well as give the companies better insights into how their technology can benefit the department. The Daily Scoop Podcast is available every Monday-Friday afternoon. If you want to hear more of the latest from Washington, subscribe to The Daily Scoop Podcast  on Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Spotify and YouTube.