[nradov]

If the government wants a frontier LLM for military purposes then they can just put out a tender. Defense contractors like Anduril will bid on it. The end product might be slightly worse than what Anthropic sells but, as my dad used to say, "close enough for government work".

[BoxFour]

They don’t even need to do that. Elon is almost certainly pushing Grok as hard as possible right now to them, and it’s not like this administration is especially concerned with running a fair procurement process.

So it’s probably some mix of two things:

1) A punitive “bend the knee us or we’ll destroy you,” which fits their track record.

2) Skepticism that Grok is actually as strong as the benchmarks suggest, which is also a pretty reasonable possibility.