Internal docs show xAI paid contractors to "hillclimb" Grok's rank on a coding leaderboard above Anthropic's Claude.

A week after Grok's antisemitic outburst, which included praise of Hitler and a post calling itself "MechaHitler," Elon Musk's xAI has landed a US military contract worth up to $200 million. xAI announced a "Grok for Government" service after getting the contract with the US Department of Defense.

But the Grok account on X that runs off the model immediately showed there were some major issues: It started saying its surname was “Hitler”, tweeted antisemitic messages, and seemed to reference Elon Musk’s posts when asked about controversial topics, siding with the xAI owner’s views as a result.

Elon Musk’s company xAI apologized after Grok posted hate speech and extremist content, blaming a code update and pledging new safeguards to prevent future incidents.

The billionaire has used Trump’s handling of the ‘Epstein files’ issue to repeatedly attack his former ally since their public falling out last month.

In a series of posts on X, the AI chatbot Grok apologized for what it admitted was “horrific behavior.” The posts appear to be an official statement from xAI, the Elon Musk-led company behind Grok, as opposed to an AI-generated explanation for Grok’s posts.

Artificial intelligence company xAI has won a contract worth up to $300 million with the US Department of Defense, just days after its generative AI chatbot Grok went on an anti-Semitic tirade. The contract will see the Elon Musk-founded company develop and implement AI tools for the US Department of Defense.

Grok 4 by xAI was released on July 9, and it's surged ahead of competitors like DeepSeek and Claude at LMArena, a leaderboard for ranking generative AI models. However, these types of AI rankings don't factor in potential safety risks.