xAI’s Grok Chatbot Scores Government Deal Days After Trump And Musk Meeting
xAI’s Grok Chatbot Scores Government Deal Days After Trump And Musk Meeting
The Trump administration announced on Thursday that it would use Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence (AI) Grok chatbot for federal agencies.
According to a statement from the General Services Administration (GSA), federal agencies will have access to the Grok 4 and Grok 4 Fast service, which will be available for the next 18 months.
“Thanks to President Trump and his administration, xAI’s frontier AI is now unlocked for every federal agency,” Musk, cofounder and CEO of the AI company, said in a statement released by the GSA.
“We look forward to continuing to work with President Trump and his team to rapidly deploy AI throughout the government.”
The GSA said that allowing access to AI tools would enable the Trump administration to “modernize federal government operations, from predictive analytics in government acquisition to intelligent automation in administrative processes.”
Thursday’s announcement from Musk and the GSA comes just days after Musk met with President Donald Trump at the memorial for assassinated conservative influencer Charlie Kirk in Arizona over the past weekend. The two sat next to one another at one point and shook hands.
Over the summer, the pair had a high-profile public spat over the Trump- and Republican-backed One Big Beautiful Bill, following Musk’s departure from the Trump administration after serving as a special government employee and adviser to the president.
“I thought it was nice, he came over, we had a little conversation,” Trump told reporters earlier this week about their meeting at Kirk’s funeral.
Earlier this year, Grok faced criticism over the summer after it made controversial posts on Musk’s X social media platform, including one instance where it described itself as “MechaHitler” and caused that term to trend on the platform for several days.
Grok also made what appeared to be false statements about an X user in connection with deadly flooding in Texas, and appeared to threaten to assault a prominent progressive political commentator.
Several days later, xAI issued a statement saying it is “actively working to remove the inappropriate posts” and has “taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X.”
Responding to the controversy, Musk said at the time that the comments posted by Grok occurred because the chatbot was “too compliant to user prompts. Too eager to please and be manipulated.”
Big tech companies have been spending heavily on AI, viewing the new technology as a major growth engine while slashing costs elsewhere to safeguard profits.
However, some current and former employees at OpenAI and Google voiced concerns in an open letter that “serious risks” could be posed by AI and called for greater protections. The letter warned that AI could lead to “the further entrenchment of existing inequalities, to manipulation and misinformation, to the loss of control of autonomous AI systems potentially resulting in human extinction.”
“We are hopeful that these risks can be adequately mitigated with sufficient guidance from the scientific community, policymakers, and the public,” the employees said in their letter in June.
“However, AI companies have strong financial incentives to avoid effective oversight, and we do not believe bespoke structures of corporate governance are sufficient to change this.”
