The Department of Defense has announced contracts with four leading artificial intelligence companies, including Elon Musk's xAI, a week after its Grok chatbot allegedly disseminated racist rhetoric online.

The Department of Defense under Secretary Pete Hegseth has been fixated on buzzwords like “warfighting” and “warfighters,” and adopting new AI tools is part of that mission, according to leaders at the agency. And Monday’s press release was filled to the brim with similarly grandiose language.

Built using huge amounts of computing power at a Tennessee data center, Grok is Musk's attempt to outdo rivals such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini in building an AI assistant that shows its reasoning before answering a question.

Billionaire Tesla owner Elon Musk said Thursday that Tesla vehicles will soon feature the artificial intelligence chatbot Grok, developed by Musk’s AI startup xAI. In a message posted to his social media platform,