Pete Hegseth announced on Monday that the US military will begin integrating Elon Musk\u2019s artificial intelligence tool, Grok, into Pentagon networks.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cVery soon we will have the world\u2019s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,\u201d Hegseth said.<\/p>\n
Hegseth also unveiled a new \u201cAI acceleration strategy\u201d at the Department of Defense that he said will \u201cunleash 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\u201d.<\/p>\n
In December, it was announced that the defense department had selected Google\u2019s Gemini, another AI model, to power the military\u2019s new internal AI platform, known as GenAI.mil.<\/p>\n
As part of Monday\u2019s announcement, Hegseth also said that at his direction, the DOD\u2019s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office \u201cwill exercise its full authority to enforce\u201d the department\u2019s \u201cdata decrees and make all appropriate data available across federated IT systems for AI exploitation, including mission systems across every service and component\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cAI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we\u2019re going to make sure that it\u2019s there,\u201d Hegseth said.<\/p>\n
The military\u2019s new integration of Grok follows last year\u2019s announcement<\/a> that the defense department had awarded contracts of up to $200m <\/a>to the Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI to \u201cdevelop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas\u201d.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>, but the backlash continues to bite: on Saturday Indonesia temporarily blocked <\/a>access to Grok as a result, and Malaysia soon followed suit<\/a>.<\/p>\n