U.S. defence division awards contracts to Google, Elon Musk’s xAI

OpenAI, Alphabet’s Google, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s AI agency xAI have gained contracts of as much as $200 million every, geared toward scaling up adoption of superior AI capabilities within the U.S. Department of Defense, the federal government company stated on Monday.

The contracts will allow the DoD to develop agentic AI workflows and use them to handle crucial nationwide safety challenges, the division’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office stated.

“The adoption of AI is transforming the (DoD’s) ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” Chief Digital and AI Officer Doug Matty stated.

U.S. authorities businesses have been increasing their use of AI, pushed by a White House order in April selling adoption. President Donald Trump has additionally moved to melt regulation on the know-how by revoking a 2023 Biden-era govt order, which sought to scale back AI dangers by obligatory knowledge disclosures.

Separately on Monday, xAI introduced a collection of its merchandise referred to as “Grok for Government”, making its superior AI fashions — together with its newest flagship Grok 4 — out there to federal, native, state and nationwide safety clients.

The Pentagon introduced final month that OpenAI was awarded a $200 million contract, saying the ChatGPT maker would “develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains”.

The contracts introduced on Monday deepen the ties between corporations main the AI race and U.S. authorities operations, whereas addressing issues across the want for aggressive contracts for AI use in federal businesses.

In May, Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren had urged DoD to make sure aggressive AI contracting at a time when Musk’s Grok chatbot was gaining floor within the federal authorities.