Report: Grok's anti-Semitic tirades cost xAI government contract
Early in July, Grok suddenly started calling itself “MechaHitler.” This probably cost the AI company xAI a contract with the US government.
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When the AI model Grok spread anti-Semitic posts, defended Adolf Hitler, praised the Holocaust, and referred to itself as “MechaHitler” at the beginning of July, this apparently cost Elon Musk's AI company xAI an important contract with the US government. At least that's what internal documents suggest, reports the US magazine Wired. According to this, xAI was to enter into a partnership with the government together with other leading AI companies from the USA, under which government employees were to receive access. This changed abruptly, and ultimately xAI was not one of the companies now cooperating with the General Services Administration (GSA). Until months ago, Elon Musk was exceptionally closely involved in government work.
Partnerships with AI companies – except xAI
As Wired explains, this involves a contract between the GSA and AI companies. The GSA is responsible for providing the U.S. government with offices and office supplies, telecommunications equipment, and transportation capacity. Last week, the agency announced that it had reached an agreement with OpenAI to provide US federal agencies with access to ChatGPT Enterprise for their employees at a special price of one US dollar. Agreements on the use of AI technology have also been reached with Anthropic and Google. An agreement had also been prepared with xAI, but Grok was removed from all the contracts drawn up at the end of June. Two people involved suspect that this was due to the anti-Semitic tirades.
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Elon Musk announced an update of the AI account to X and better answers at the beginning of July. Shortly afterwards, he began spreading anti-Semitic content. The account was then deactivated. As a result, Poland's government, among others, called on the EU Commission to investigate possible violations of the Digital Services Act (DSA) by Grok. The report by Wired now suggests that xAI has lost the opportunity to extensively enter US federal agencies due to the outages. However, the company has probably not lost out on any major business because of the special prices. At the beginning of the year, Elon Musk was a “special government employee” with particularly close contact with US President Donald Trump for months.
(mho)
