When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced the Pentagon would integrate Elon Musk’s Grok models into military systems, he framed the decision around ideological constraints. The “Department of War AI will not be woke,” he said, echoing Musk’s vision for the chatbot as a rival to what he viewed as liberal-biased alternatives. In reality, Hegseth is following in the footsteps of many organizational leaders who are investing across all the AI models in order to keep up with ever-changing and evolving technology.
The Pentagon previously built an internal platform with Google’s Gemini and has contracts with several other tech companies to develop AI tools for internal use. That’s the value of companies like Perplexity, which offer multiple models to choose between depending on the task since every few months it seems like a different AI model pulls ahead of the pack. It’s still early days for Grok’s enterprise business — it only launched last month — and Grok has already run into its fair share of problems. But a plug from the Defense Department will help it as it looks to expand its footprint and keep up as all the models try to one-up each other.