White House Fast-Tracks Approval of xAI’s Grok for Government Use
The United States White House has allegedly intervened to fast-track the approval of xAI’s Grok for government use, despite reports of friction between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk. According to Wired, documents and internal emails suggest that senior officials directed the General Services Administration (GSA) to add Musk’s AI platform to its list of approved vendors, granting federal agencies access to Grok’s large language models.
xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, was notably excluded from the GSA’s August vendor approvals, which added OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic to the government’s marketplace. However, emails published by Wired suggest that GSA leadership received explicit instructions from the White House to reverse that decision.
“Team: Grok/xAI needs to go back on the schedule ASAP per the WH,”
wrote Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, a branch of the GSA.
“Should be all of their products we had previously (3 & 4),” he added, referring to Grok 3 and Grok 4, xAI’s latest large language models.
The emails also reference Carahsoft, a major government contractor and technology reseller. Gruenbaum instructed officials to coordinate immediately with Carahsoft, and Wired reports that the company’s contract was modified earlier this week to include xAI.
As of Friday morning, both Grok 3 and Grok 4 are now available on GSA Advantage, the federal government’s online marketplace where agencies can purchase approved products and services.
Meanwhile, Musk has continued integrating Grok into his broader ecosystem. According to the Financial Times, Musk told advertisers during a live discussion that Grok’s responses on X (formerly Twitter) may eventually include paid advertisements. He described a vision where marketers could pay to have their solutions appear directly within Grok’s answers.
“If a person is asking Grok to solve a specific problem,” Musk said,
“advertising the specific solution would be ideal at that point.”
Musk also reiterated his long-term goal of making Grok “the smartest, most accurate AI in the world,” noting that the company’s next focus is covering the costs of its expensive GPU infrastructure.
