The Pentagon’s $200M contract with Elon Musk’s Grok AI highlights the balance between cutting-edge innovation and responsibility amid controversies over offensive chatbot outputs.

The announcement comes days after Grok spewed antisemitic and racist statements to its users, including praise for Adolf Hitler and “the white man.” It also referred to itself as “MechaHitler.” The debacle kick-started a wave of celebration amongst online extremists, many of whom called for the creation of more hateful AI chatbots.

The important thing to remember here is just that a single sentence can fundamentally change the way these systems respond to people, said Alex Mahadevan of the Poynter Institute, discussing the irritable actions of big language models (LLMs) such as Grok.

Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Elon Musk's xAI — will help the DOD develop AI workflows for key national security missions.

Elon Musk's AI startup xAI has announced a nearly $200 million contract with the US Department of Defense for developing AI tools for the agency. The news comes a week after xAI's foul-mouthed Grok chatbot had a full-blown Nazi meltdown,

The announcement comes after FedScoop reported on the General Services Administration’s interest in the tool late last week.

In an announcement, Musk’s company, xAI, said it was releasing “Grok for Government,” a form of AI that allows federal, state, and local governments to utilize it for their specific needs.