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.
Musk, according to the Wall Street Journal, picked 42 cents as a reference to sci-fi novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.It’s hard to calculate how much money Musk is saving the government by offering the model at only 42 cents a pop; xAI’s Grok 4 Fast is priced per output, and generally agencies might be on the hook for hefty API licensing fees.
“We really like the notion of having strong competition and market tension between these models and these companies,” Federal Acquisition Service Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. “When someone goes and updates their model with a cool feature, that only encourages the others to go do the same thing.”
