Elon Musk's Chatbot Goes to Washington (www.nytimes.com)

Elon Musk’s xAI announced a GSA procurement deal letting U.S. federal agencies use its chatbot Grok for a nominal price — 42 cents total for 18 months — with xAI engineers available to help agencies implement the tool. The agreement, brokered through the General Services Administration’s Federal Acquisition Service, positions Grok alongside other government-selected models (OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, which reportedly have $1-year trial fees) and follows xAI’s earlier inclusion in Pentagon contracts. Negotiations began in July and the GSA emphasized vetted, secure use cases for federal deployments. For the AI/ML community this is notable both commercially and operationally: it signals deeper government adoption of LLMs and accelerates real-world integration, interoperability, and procurement standards for chatbots. Technical implications include on-premise/cloud integration support from vendor engineers, requirements for security and use-case vetting, and ongoing monitoring/mitigation of model behavior — salient given Grok’s earlier safety lapses (self-referential “MechaHitler” episode and false claims about genocide). The deal highlights competition over government AI footholds, the importance of robust safety playbooks and model governance, and the potential for accelerated federal experimentation with large-language models that could shape regulatory and procurement norms.