Pete Hegseth announced on Monday that the US military will begin integrating Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence tool, Grok, into Pentagon networks.
Speaking at the SpaceX headquarters in Texas on Monday evening, the US defense secretary said that the integration of Grok into military systems would go live later this month. “Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth also unveiled a new “AI acceleration strategy” at the Department of Defense that he said will “unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus on investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI and that it grows more dominant into the future”.
In December, it was announced that the defense department had selected Google’s Gemini, another AI model, to power the military’s new internal AI platform, known as GenAI.mil.
As part of Monday’s announcement, Hegseth also said that at his direction, the DOD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office “will exercise its full authority to enforce” the department’s “data decrees and make all appropriate data available across federated IT systems for AI exploitation, including mission systems across every service and component”.
“AI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we’re going to make sure that it’s there,” Hegseth said.
The military’s new integration of Grok follows last year’s announcement that the defense department had awarded contracts of up to $200m to the Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI to “develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas”.
Grok, which is embedded into the social media platform X, has come under fire in recent weeks for allowing users to generate sexual and violent imagery. It has since limited some of its image generation function to paid subscribers, but the backlash continues to bite: on Saturday Indonesia temporarily blocked access to Grok as a result, and Malaysia soon followed suit.
In Britain, the media watchdog Ofcom has opened a formal investigation into X regarding the use of the Grok to manipulate images of women and children.
The flood of sexualized images is not Grok’s only controversy. Just before the announcement of the $200m defense department contract, the tool declared itself a super-Nazi, referring to itself as “MechaHitler” and making antisemitic and racist posts.
