‘Most powerful AI’: Trump, Elon Musk come together once again after Charlie Kirk funeral

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The Trump administration’s General Services Administration (GSA), which oversees federal real estate, procurement, and technology services, announced on Thursday that it has partnered with Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, to streamline government operations.Under the agreement, valid through March 2027, federal agencies will gain access to xAI’s Grok 4 and Grok 4 Fast chatbots at a nominal fee. Musk said the deal would help drive innovation across government while keeping costs low.”xAI has the most powerful AI compute and most capable AI models in the world,” Musk was quoted as saying by Fox News.”Thanks to President Trump and his administration, xAI’s frontier AI is now unlocked for every federal agency, empowering the US Government to innovate faster and accomplish its mission more effectively than ever before,” he added. The agreement between GSA and xAI is effective immediately, allowing federal agencies to “begin leveraging the benefits of Grok AI models through GSA’s established procurement channels,” the GSA press release says.Under the agreement between xAI and the General Services Administration, which oversees many of the US government’s vendor contracts, federal agencies will pay just 42 cents to use xAI’s Grok chatbot for 18 months. Agencies adopting Grok will also receive support from xAI engineers to help implement the company’s tools, as cited by the New York Times. Josh Gruenbaum, federal acquisition service commissioner at the General Services Administration, said in a press release that broader access to AI models is an “essential” tool, not only for fulfilling Trump’s promise that the United States will win the AI race, but also for “building the efficient, accountable government that taxpayers deserve.”Under the agreement, xAI engineers will provide full support to “accelerate the adoption of Grok to transform government operations.”Gruenbaum said that the AI tools being rolled out are crucial for advancing Trump’s goal of modernizing government operations and competing with China in the global AI race. He added that xAI “stood out” as a strong partner, offering “world class technical talent,” as cited by Fox News. The company was one of several AI firms chosen for Pentagon contracts in July. In August, the federal government announced similar AI chatbot agreements with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and Anthropic, the maker of Claude. Both companies are charging agencies a $1 fee to use their chatbots for a year.Meanwhile, hundreds of federal workers who were laid off during Elon Musk’s cost-cutting measures are being offered their jobs back. The General Services Administration has given these employees, who managed government workspaces, until the end of the week to decide whether to accept or decline reinstatement, as reported by AP.