The Trump administration introduced on Thursday that it could use Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s synthetic intelligence (AI) Grok chatbot for federal businesses.
In response to a statement from the Normal Providers Administration (GSA), federal businesses can have entry to the Grok 4 and Grok 4 Quick service, which might be accessible for the following 18 months.
“Due to President Trump and his administration, xAI’s frontier AI is now unlocked for each federal company,” Musk, cofounder and CEO of the AI firm, mentioned in an announcement launched by the GSA.
“We stay up for persevering with to work with President Trump and his group to quickly deploy AI all through the federal government.”
The GSA mentioned that permitting entry to AI instruments would allow the Trump administration to “modernize federal authorities operations, from predictive analytics in authorities acquisition to clever automation in administrative processes.”
Thursday’s announcement from Musk and the GSA comes simply days after Musk met with President Donald Trump on the memorial for assassinated conservative influencer Charlie Kirk in Arizona over the previous weekend. The 2 sat subsequent to 1 one other at one level and shook arms.
Over the summer season, the pair had a high-profile public spat over the Trump- and Republican-backed One Massive Stunning Invoice, following Musk’s departure from the Trump administration after serving as a particular authorities worker and adviser to the president.
“I believed it was good, he came visiting, we had just a little dialog,” Trump told reporters earlier this week about their assembly at Kirk’s funeral.
Earlier this yr, Grok confronted criticism over the summer season after it made controversial posts on Musk’s X social media platform, together with one occasion the place it described itself as “MechaHitler” and brought about that time period to development on the platform for a number of days.
Grok additionally made what gave the impression to be false statements about an X consumer in reference to lethal flooding in Texas, and appeared to threaten to assault a outstanding progressive political commentator.
A number of days later, xAI issued an announcement saying it’s “actively working to take away the inappropriate posts” and has “taken motion to ban hate speech earlier than Grok posts on X.”
Responding to the controversy, Musk said on the time that the feedback posted by Grok occurred as a result of the chatbot was “too compliant to consumer prompts. Too wanting to please and be manipulated.”
Massive tech corporations have been spending closely on AI, viewing the brand new expertise as a serious development engine whereas slashing prices elsewhere to safeguard earnings.
Nevertheless, some present and former staff at OpenAI and Google voiced considerations in an open letter that “critical dangers” may very well be posed by AI and called for larger protections. The letter warned that AI may result in “the additional entrenchment of current inequalities, to manipulation and misinformation, to the lack of management of autonomous AI programs probably leading to human extinction.”
“We’re hopeful that these dangers might be adequately mitigated with ample steering from the scientific group, policymakers, and the general public,” the staff mentioned of their letter in June.
“Nevertheless, AI corporations have sturdy monetary incentives to keep away from efficient oversight, and we don’t consider bespoke buildings of company governance are ample to alter this.”
Reuters contributed to this report.
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