Elon Musk's Controversial Robot Secures a Contract with the Department of Defense

The U.S. Department of Defense announced new contracts with Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI on Monday that will give the federal agency access to the latest AI agents. The contract with each company has a ceiling of $200 million, and while it’s not surprising that DoD is pushing hard into AI, the inclusion of Elon Musk’s xAI will raise plenty of eyebrows after Grok’s recent erratic behavior.

The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) announced the new contracts in a press release Monday, which notes DoD is “implementing a commercial-first approach to accelerating DoD adoption of AI.”

“Establishing these partnerships will broaden DoD use of and experience in frontier AI capabilities and increase the ability of these companies to understand and address critical national security needs with the most advanced AI capabilities U.S. industry has to offer,” the press release explains.

But xAI has been generating lots of attention lately that may give people both in and out of government some pause. Grok, xAI’s chatbot, started randomly spouting right-wing conspiracy theories back in May about white farmers in South Africa being murdered for their race. And last week, Grok praised Adolf Hitler, spread anti-semitic phrases, and advocated for another Holocaust against Jews.

The Grok public relations account on X noted the new contract with DoD in a tweet Monday but also introduced a new suite of products called Grok for Government and said its products would be listed on the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule, a huge win for the company that makes Grok available to federal government employees even beyond the Pentagon. “This allows every federal government department, agency, or office, to purchase xAI products,” the company wrote.

“Under the umbrella of Grok For Government, we will be bringing all of our world-class AI tools to federal, local, state, and national security customers,” the company said in a press release. “These customers will be able to use the Grok family of products to accelerate America – from making everyday government services faster and more efficient to using AI to address unsolved problems in fundamental science and technology.”

Announcing Grok for Government – a suite of products that make our frontier models available to United States Government customers

We are especially excited about two new partnerships for our US Government partners

1) a new contract from the US Department of Defense
2) our…

— xAI (@xai) July 14, 2025

Musk held a livestream demonstration about Grok 4 on Wednesday of last week, just a day after the AI chatbot went full Nazi.

“America is the world leader in AI, and this is in no small part due to a tradition of innovation and strong investments in engineering and science. We’re excited to contribute back to the country that made xAI uniquely possible here,” xAI said in a continued.

Musk was recently a special government employee in the White House as the head of DOGE until he had a falling out with President Donald Trump. Musk accused Trump of being in the so-called “Epstein files,” in a tweet he later deleted, but the billionaire oligarch seems to have softened his criticism of the president lately, perhaps over fears about losing lucrative government contracts like the one announced today.

The Department of Defense under Secretary Pete Hegseth has been fixated on buzzwords like “warfighting” and “warfighters,” and adopting new AI tools is part of that mission, according to leaders at the agency. And Monday’s press release was filled to the brim with similarly grandiose language.

“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” said DoD Chief Digital and AI Officer Dr. Doug Matty. “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.”

Maybe Grok can teach the folks at the Pentagon some new synonyms for warfighter.