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 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.

The Pentagon awards $200 million contracts to Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI to develop AI systems for US defense and national security operations

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 Pentagon has signed contracts with four AI companies to use and test their technology. There is also money for Grok 4 from xAI.

The money behind Elon Musk’s trillion-dollar empire is increasingly flowing in one direction: toward artificial intelligence.