XAI's Grok Chatbot Scores Government Deal Days After Trump and Musk Meeting (www.forbes.com)

The General Services Administration has signed an agreement to make Elon Musk’s xAI “Grok for Government” chatbot available to federal agencies for $0.42 per agency for 18 months, with xAI also offering workforce training and assistance for “secure integration.” The move follows similar low-fee GSA arrangements with other vendors — OpenAI ($1 per agency for ChatGPT Enterprise), Anthropic ($1 for Claude), and Google ($0.47 for Gemini) — and comes days after Musk was publicly seen speaking with President Trump, adding a political footnote to the timing. For the AI/ML community this underlines two trends: rapid government adoption via low-cost, pilot-friendly procurement and aggressive vendor competition to secure potential long-term contracts. Technically, the deal signals federal interest in deploying chat-based LLM services at scale while prioritizing integration support and security onboarding — areas that will shape engineering priorities (APIs, deployment controls, access management, logging, and compliance). The token pricing suggests these are introductory access paths rather than full enterprise deployments, raising questions about future commercialization, model governance, and vendor lock-in as agencies move from trial to production.