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

The Pentagon is set to spend nearly a billion dollars for AI with four major Silicon Valley tech firms, Google, xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic.

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.

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.

Elon Musk said on Monday he does not support a merger between his electric vehicle maker Tesla and his artificial intelligence startup xAI, which owns the Grok chatbot and competes with the likes of OpenAI's ChatGPT.