Even the ugliest feuds with President Donald Trump seem to end with the art of the deal.
The U.S. government just inked a deal to put Elon Musk’s Grok AI inside federal agencies for 42 cents per agency—a bargain that the government called “unique” and could reset Musk’s rocky relationship with Trump and scramble the fight over which models dominate Washington.
It’s the latest in a string of deals that the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), the agency responsible for technology procurement, has made with the top AI companies—Alphabet’s Google; the ChatGPT maker OpenAI; and Anthropic—as part of its new initiative, the OneGov agreement. Each of these deals are short-term—to prevent one model dominating, the GSA said—but Grok’s is the longest, with an 18- month contract. On Sept. 22, the GSA announced that it would be working with Meta to get free access to its Llama models, while OpenAI and Anthropic agreed to provide their models for $1, and Google charged 47 cents.
