Further reading (Part 1): Hegseth and Musk promise to make “Star Trek real”.
United States Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has announced a new partnership with Elon Musk’s xAI that will bring the Grok chatbot into Pentagon networks, marking an acceleration of the military’s embrace of artificial intelligence. Speaking during a visit to SpaceX, Hegseth said leading AI models would soon operate across both classified and unclassified Defense Department systems.
Grok will join Google’s generative AI tools inside the Pentagon later this month, according to Hegseth, who said the military plans to feed vast amounts of operational and intelligence data into AI systems. He described the effort as essential to speeding up innovation and maintaining an edge, arguing that AI is only as effective as the data it is trained on.
The announcement comes amid intensifying controversy around Grok. The chatbot has faced global scrutiny for generating sexualized and nonconsensual deepfake images, prompting Malaysia and Indonesia to block it outright and regulators in the UK and Europe to open investigations. Now, many say the Pentagon’s decision risks amplifying concerns.
However, Hegseth brushed aside those worries, saying the military needs AI systems that can support real world combat operations without ideological limits. He pledged that Pentagon AI would be responsible but also made clear he had little interest in models that restrict lawful military use, declaring that the United States military AI “will not be woke.”
The shift signals a break from the more cautious approach taken by the previous administration, which promoted AI adoption while imposing strict limits on sensitive uses. It remains unclear whether those safeguards still apply as the Trump administration pushes to integrate AI more deeply and rapidly into United States defense operations, even as Grok faces mounting questions beyond the battlefield…