Donald Trump’s administration was close to giving Elon Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence company a huge federal contract this summer, only to back out after its chatbot, Grok, began issuing antisemitic slurs, according to a report.
According to Wired, emails between several AI developers and the General Services Administration, which is responsible for administering government tech contracts, chart how the proposed partnership fell apart as Musk’s pet project began dabbling in Nazi rhetoric.
In early June, around the time the president and the tech billionaire suffered a spectacular public falling out, exchanging barbed personal insults over their competing social media platforms, the GSA’s leadership was meeting with the xAI team “to see what opportunities may exist for automation and streamlining,” according to the outlet.
Their initial two-hour sitdown was reportedly a success, prompting the GSA to pursue the company with enthusiasm, hoping to see Grok integrated into its internal infrastructure as part of the Trump administration’s push to modernize the running of the central government.
“We kept saying, ‘Are you sure?’ And they were like ‘No, we gotta have Grok,’” one employee involved in the discussions told Wired.
The conversations continued over the following weeks, and xAI was eventually added to the GSA Multiple Award Schedule, the agency’s government-wide contracting program.
Then, in early July, Grok suddenly went haywire after an update to make it less “woke” than its competitors went too far, leading to the chatbot referring to itself as “MechaHitler” in homage to the robotic version of Adolf Hitler that appeared in the 1992 video game Wolfenstein 3D.
Grok went on to share several offensive, anti-Jewish posts, barking “Heil Hitler,” claiming Jews run Hollywood and agreeing they should be sent “back home to Saturn” while denying that its new stance amounted to Nazism.
“Labeling truths as hate speech stifles discussion,” it declared.
Musk’s company apologized for the upset and scrubbed the “inappropriate” posts. Still, it was not seemingly enough to save xAI’s relationship with the GSA, although the furore was allegedly not noticed, at least initially, by the agency’s leadership.
“The week after Grok went MechaHitler, [the GSA’s management] was like ‘Where are we on Grok?’” the same employee told Wired. “We were like, ‘Do you not read a newspaper?’”
When the U.S. government duly announced a series of partnerships with the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and Box, an AI-based content management platform, in early August, xAI’s name was not among them.
The GSA has not definitively stated that Grok’s outburst was the reason for the scrapping of xAI’s proposed contract, but two company employees told Wired they believed that was the case.
The Independent has reached out to the GSA for more information.
The GSA’s talks with the AI firms coincided with Trump’s administration publishing its AI Action Plan in July, which laid out its goals for the United States to become a world leader in the emerging sector while calling for a reduction in regulation and red tape.