{"id":367271,"date":"2025-12-23T19:16:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T19:16:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/367271\/"},"modified":"2025-12-23T19:16:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T19:16:09","slug":"pentagon-adds-grok-derived-products-to-something-called-the-ai-arsenal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/367271\/","title":{"rendered":"Pentagon Adds Grok-Derived Products to Something Called the \u2018AI Arsenal\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Pentagon is now armed to the teeth with \u201cfrontier AI systems, based on the Grok family of models,\u201d according to a press release issued Monday<\/a>. Are you trembling now, ISIS? Does the word \u201cGrok\u201d send a chill down your spines, Tren De Aragua? <\/p>\n

This expansion of what the release calls the U.S. \u201cAI Arsenal\u201d is apparently being slotted into the Pentagon\u2019s more expansive AI platform called \u201cGenAI.mil,\u201d launched earlier this month with Google\u2019s Gemini for Government built into it, according to an earlier press release<\/a>. U.S. \u201cSecretary of War\u201d Pete Hegseth apparently provided the following quote for that release, \u201cAI tools present boundless opportunities to increase efficiency, and we are thrilled to witness AI\u2019s future positive impact across the War Department.\u201d Hegseth\u2019s quote sounds uncannily like it was written by a 22-year-old graduate from the public relations program at Stanford.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While the Israeli armed forces appear to have<\/a> used AI against Gaza in chillingly lethal ways, GenAI.mil sounds much more Dilbert-ish. If you were worried the Pentagon\u2019s Aeron chair jockeys were going to be stuck using Gemini for Government, I have great news: they\u2019ll also have\u2014when the software is implemented in \u201cearly 2026\u2033\u2014exciting new AI products from an Elon Musk-owned company, which will enable \u201cthe secure handling of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) in daily workflows,\u201d along with \u201caccess to real\u2011time global insights from the X platform, providing War Department personnel with a decisive information advantage.\u201d <\/p>\n

An April executive order from Trump<\/a> sought to revolutionize efficiency in the Pentagon by ordering reviews with goals like, \u201cEliminate or revise any unnecessary supplemental regulations or any other internal guidance\u201d\u2014the usual Republican idea that you can improve everything by cutting red tape. Anyway, now the military\u2019s \u201cbespoke AI platform\u201d will include a second set of models to apply to everyone\u2019s AI-intensive tasks, so things are getting very efficient over there. <\/p>\n

But while the Trump Administration has been unusually friendly to the whims of AI\u2019s cheerleaders<\/a>, there\u2019s bipartisan precedent for this kind of thing. For instance, Google\u2019s former CEO Eric Schmidt\u2019s involvement in a Biden era effort<\/a> to \u201csignificantly increase\u201d AI-related spending on defense and security programs in the federal government was called out by Senator Elizabeth Warren as a potential conflict of interest<\/a>. And xAI and Google are far from the only tech companies<\/a> seeking to intertwine their interests with those of the defense industry.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s currently hard to picture Grok being a crucial link in the \u201ckill chain\u201d or something. This feels more like the Defense Department issuing a press release about a new supplier of toner, with a bit of Dot-Com Bubble flavor thrown in. It\u2019s like the Pentagon is announcing that every desk at the Pentagon, currently equipped only with CompuServe, will now get its very own AOL CD-ROM too. Very cool. Thanks for telling us, Secretary Hegseth.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Pentagon is now armed to the teeth with \u201cfrontier AI systems, based on the Grok family of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367272,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,3120,14034,105,3123],"class_list":["post-367271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-elon-musk","tag-pete-hegseth","tag-technology","tag-xai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367271","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367271"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367271\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367272"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}