Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday expressing concern about the Pentagon’s decision to grant Elon Musk’s company xAI access to sensitive networks.
“The controversial AI model Grok developed by xAI has had disturbing consequences for users, including giving them ‘advice on how to commit murder or terrorist attacks,’ generating anti-Semitic content, and creating child sexual abuse material,” the letter said.
Warren said Grok’s “clear lack of adequate guardrails” could pose “significant risks to the safety of U.S. military personnel and the cybersecurity of sensitive systems.” She asked Hegseth to provide information on how the Pentagon plans to “mitigate these potential national security risks.”
Warren is not the first person to express alarm over Grok, the controversial xAI chatbot, accessing sensitive systems. Last month, a coalition of nonprofit organizations called on the government to immediately halt the deployment of Grok in federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, after X users repeatedly encouraged the chatbot to convert real photos of women, and in some cases children, into sexualized images without their consent. On the same day that Warren sent her letter, a class action lawsuit was filed against xAI, alleging that Grok generated sexual content from actual images of plaintiffs who were minors.
The letter comes in the wake of the Department of Defense’s decision to classify Anthropic as a supply chain risk after the company refused to give the military unrestricted access to its AI systems. Anthropic was, until recently, the only AI company with a classified response system. Amid that conflict, the Department of Defense signed contracts with OpenAI and xAI to use their AI systems on classified networks, according to Axios.
A senior Pentagon official confirmed that the Grok was installed for use in classified environments, but has not yet been used.
“It is unclear what assurances or documentation xAI provided to the Department of Defense regarding Grok’s security safeguards, data processing practices, or safety controls, or whether the Department of Defense evaluated those assurances, prior to reportedly granting access to Grok’s sensitive systems,” Warren wrote.
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Warren asked for a copy of the agreement reportedly reached between the Pentagon and xAI regarding the use of Grok on classified systems, as well as an explanation of how the Pentagon plans to ensure that Grok is not exposed to cyberattacks and that “military secrets and classified information will not be compromised.”
(Last week, it was reported that a former employee of Mr. Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency stole Americans’ personal data from the Social Security Administration and stored it on thumb drives, the latest accusation in a DOGE-related data breach.)
Pentagon Chief Press Secretary Sean Parnell said the Pentagon “looks forward to bringing Grok to our official AI platform, GenAI.mil, in the near future.”
GenAI.mil is the military’s secure enterprise platform for generative AI, giving Department of Defense personnel access to large-scale language models (LLMs) and other AI tools in a government-approved cloud environment. It is primarily designed to assist with non-classified tasks such as research, documentation, and data analysis.
