Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says the Pentagon is preparing to bring Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok into its internal networks, placing it alongside Google’s generative AI tools as the military accelerates its push to embed artificial intelligence across its operations.
Speaking Monday at SpaceX in South Texas, Hegseth said the Defense Department plans to deploy leading AI models across both classified and unclassified systems.
“Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said.
The move comes at a turbulent moment for Grok. The chatbot, which is integrated into Musk-owned social platform X, has faced global backlash in recent days for generating highly sexualized deepfake images of people without their consent. Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked access to Grok, while the U.K.’s independent online safety regulator said Monday it has opened an investigation. In response, Grok has limited image generation and editing features to paying users.
Despite the controversy, Hegseth said Grok is expected to go live inside the Defense Department later this month. He also said the Pentagon plans to make “all appropriate data” from military IT systems available for AI use, including data from intelligence databases.
The announcement underscores a more aggressive stance on AI adoption than that taken by the Biden administration, which pushed federal agencies to explore AI while stressing the need for guardrails. Biden-era officials warned that poorly regulated AI could be used for mass surveillance, cyberattacks, or even autonomous weapons systems.
In late 2024, the Biden administration issued a framework encouraging national security agencies to expand their use of advanced AI while banning certain applications, such as systems that violate civil rights or automate nuclear weapons deployment. It is unclear whether those limits remain in effect under the Trump administration.
As the Pentagon races to integrate cutting-edge AI, the decision to deploy a chatbot under active global scrutiny highlights the growing tension between rapid adoption and responsible use of emerging technology.
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