Elon Musk’s Grok AI lands $200M Pentagon contract, days after spouting antisemitism

(KRON) — Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot has landed a $200 million contract with the United States Department of Defense (DOD) just a few days after it made a series of high-profile antisemitic outbursts. On Monday, the U.S. Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) announced it had awarded contracts to several leading U.S. artificial intelligence companies.

The contracts, which are intended to “accelerate Department of Defense (DOD) adoption of advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges,” were awarded to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Musk’s xAI. Each of the contracts has a $200 million ceiling.

The contracts, according to a CDAO news release, “will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of U.S. frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas.”

The inclusion of Musk’s xAI in the contract comes in the aftermath of the Tesla CEO’s very public falling out with President Donald Trump over the recent Republican-backed tax bill. On Monday, xAI announced “Grok for Government,” calling it “a suite of frontier AI products available first to United States Government customers.”

In addition to the DOD contract, Grok for Government will also include “custom models for national security and critical science applications,” according to a news release.

The DOD’s contract with Grok comes just a week after the chatbot made a series of antisemitic comments on X and at one point, proclaimed itself “MechaHitler.”