Elon Musk’s xAI has reached an settlement with the U.S. authorities’s buying arm to promote its AI chatbot Grok to the federal authorities for beneath a greenback, pitting it in opposition to OpenAI and Anthropic.
Beneath the settlement between xAI and the Common Companies Administration (GSA), federal businesses can be charged 42 cents to make use of xAI’s chatbot Grok for a yr and a half. OpenAI and Anthropic are providing their respective enterprise and authorities variations of ChatGPT and Claude for $1 for a yr.
The steep low cost for federal businesses consists of entry to xAI engineers to assist combine the know-how.
The value level is both a part of a working joke Musk has of utilizing variations of 420, a marijuana reference, or a nod to one among Musk’s favourite books, “The Hitchhiker’s Information to the Galaxy,” which references the quantity 42 as the reply to the which means of life and the universe.
xAI had been near being permitted as a GSA vendor earlier this yr, however after Grok started producing antisemitic posts and calling itself “MechaHitler” on X, the deliberate partnership reportedly fell by way of. In late August, inner emails obtained by Wired revealed the White Home had instructed the GSA so as to add xAI’s Grok to the permitted vendor record “ASAP.”
The corporate was additionally one among a number of AI companies, together with Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, to be chosen for a $200 million contract with the Pentagon.
After President Donald Trump’s inauguration, Musk shaped and led the Division of Authorities Effectivity, or DOGE, in a rampant cost-cutting spree that has seen blended outcomes. Throughout that point, Musk positioned a number of aides on the GSA and different authorities businesses answerable for regulating or awarding authorities contracts in industries during which Musk has enterprise.
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