Elon Musk listens as President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the Oval Office of the White House, Friday, May 30, 2025, in Washington.Evan Vucci/ AP
The Pentagon will start using Elon Musk’s AI-powered chatbot, Grok, days after it published a string of antisemitic posts, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced on Monday.
The move is a part of a larger rollout of Musk’s company, xAI, for a new program called “Grok for Government,” which describes itself a as a “suite of frontier AI products available to United States Government customers.” xAI said that the $200 million contract with the US Department of Defense would allow “every federal government department, agency, or office, to access xAI’s frontier AI products.”
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.
As my colleague Anna Merlan reported:
Andrew Torba, the c0-founder and CEO of the far-right social network Gab, was especially ecstatic.
“Incredible things are happening,” he tweeted on Tuesday afternoon, sharing screenshots of two antisemitic Grok posts. Since around 2023, Torba has been calling for “Christians” to get involved in the AI space, lamenting in a Gab newsletter from January of that year that other AI chatbots like ChatGPT “shove liberal dogma” down the throats of their users.
The Pentagon’s partnership with Grok comes amid the ongoing public feud between President Donald Trump and Musk, which has seen Musk calling the Republican spending bill “utterly insane and destructive.” The billionaire also seemingly accused the president of being named in the Jeffrey Epstein files. In response, Trump threatened to terminate Musk’s government contracts and even hinted at deporting Musk.
