Pete Hegseth announced Monday that the U.S. Army will begin integrating Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence tool, Grok, into Pentagon networks.
Speaking at SpaceX headquarters in Texas on Monday evening, the US Defense Secretary said Grok’s integration into military systems would go live later this month. “Very soon our department will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth also unveiled a new “AI Acceleration Strategy” at the Department of Defense, which he said will “initiate experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus investment, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead the way in military AI and that it is even more effective in the future.”
In December, it was announced that the Defense Department had selected Google’s Gemini, another AI model, to power the Army’s new internal AI platform, known as GenAI.mil.
As part of Monday’s announcement, Hegseth also said that at his direction, DOD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office will “exercise its full authority to enforce the data decree” of the department and make all appropriate data available in federated IT systems for AI exploitation, including mission systems across every service and component.
“AI is only as good as the data it receives, and we’re going to make sure that exists,” Hegseth said.
Grok’s new integration of the army follows last year’s Announcement The Defense Department awarded contracts worth up to $200 million to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and XAI to “develop agentic AI workflows across diverse mission areas.”
Grok, which is built into the social media platform X, has come under criticism in recent weeks for allowing users to generate sexual and violent imagery. It has since limited some of its image creation operations to paid customers, but the backlash continues: Indonesia temporarily blocked access to Grok on Saturday, and Malaysia soon followed.
In the UK, media watchdog Ofcom has launched a formal investigation into Ax regarding the use of Grok to manipulate images of women and children.
The flood of erotic images is not Grok’s only controversy. Just before the announcement of a $200 million Defense Department contract, Toole declared himself a super-Nazi, referred to himself as “MechaHitler” and made anti-Semitic and racist posts.
