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New data suggests government workers don’t like Elon Musk’s chatbot. Does anybody?
New data suggests government workers don’t like Elon Musk’s chatbot. Does anybody?
There is a harsh truth about Elon Musk’s “truth-seeking” AI chatbot Grok: It’s not very good, and not many people are using it. That’s the takeaway of a new Reuters report, which found that Grok barely appears in federal records of how the US government used AI last year. It’s not the only sign xAI’s signature chatbot is in trouble, even as Musk puts it at the heart of what could be the biggest IPO in history.
Reuters reviewed more than 400 examples of government AI use where specific vendors were named. Grok or xAI, it found, appeared in only three — each of those for basic uses like document drafting or social media management, and always alongside competitors like Microsoft and OpenAI. OpenAI’s models, by comparison, appeared in more than 230 examples, while Google and Anthropic each appeared dozens of times.
A similar pattern appeared in another database of more ambitious government AI projects with smaller numbers of users. Grok appeared just three times: twice for routine administrative tasks at the Election Assistance Commission, and once in a Department of Energy pilot at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for document summaries and general research. Reuters found 140 entries involving Microsoft and OpenAI, while my brief review found at least 10 entries for Anthropic and dozens for Google’s Gemini.
The lists are an incomplete and patchy measure of government adoption. Many more examples are listed without a specific vendor, and it’s clear there is no universal definition of what counts as AI. The data also doesn’t capture intelligence agencies or the Pentagon — where xAI secured a $200 million contract last year and was recently cleared to operate on classified networks after Anthropic’s blacklisting.
Still, it’s not looking good for Grok. It shows up far less than its rivals, and when it does show up, it’s mostly for basic admin work — hardly befitting the world-class frontier model Musk has spent years bragging about.