‘Not Woke’: Pentagon Embraces Elon Musk’s Grok AI Despite Global Backlash

The Pentagon is betting on Elon Musk’s Grok… even as the chatbot faces global backlash for generating sexualized images.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the deal between the Department of Defense and xAI on Jan. 12, according to ABC News. The integration will place Grok alongside technologies like Google’s AI engine, Gemini, in the military’s AI arsenal.

This decision signals Musk’s belief in Grok’s utility beyond consumer use, despite the recent controversy that threatened to alienate millions of its users.

Speaking at SpaceX’s Starbase facility, Hegseth said, “Very soon, we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department.”

Grok, forging ahead, in the midst of a global controversy

Over the past month, X users reported that Grok consistently generated sexualized images of women and children. The controversy quickly became a global backlash from top political leaders. X immediately responded by placing that feature behind a paywall, intensifying the backlash.

Even in the US, it was not spared: three senators wrote to Google to have X, alongside Grok, removed from their stores.

Despite the controversy, Musk has been bullish on Grok with this new development being part of the deal to keep things accelerating. Already, SpaceX, which produces spacecraft and aims to take humans to Mars, has gotten military contracts and partnerships under past administrations. 

With this new development, it appears that the sexual controversy may take a lighter turn, especially in the US. However, critics question why the Department of Defense chose Grok despite its past ethical failures.

AI in defense: a mix of two kinds of data

The deal, which Hegseth said will kickstart operations later this month, will combine the US military intelligence data and Grok’s AI data. At the SpaceX-hosted event, he announced that the military would feed data from its intelligence database into the AI system. 

He further assured that he would “make all appropriate data” used by the military’s IT available for “AI exploitation,” according to the Associated Press.

According to Hegseth, this is part of a broader plan to get all the US leading AI models into the military’s network, a sharp contrast to the policies of the past administration. Although the Biden administration supported AI development, it seemed to focus more on its ethical concerns. As a result, many regulations were imposed on the use and production of AI during that administration. 

Further speaking on the use of data, Hegseth highlighted the Pentagon’s strength, saying that it has “combat-proven operational data from two decades of military intelligence operations,” while adding that “AI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we’re going to make sure that it’s there.”

Ethical considerations

One of the biggest challenges of AI systems has been the issue of their ethical programming and guardrails. AI is powerful, and its misuse could have devastating effects. 

Biden championed policies to enforce responsible use of AI in defense applications. To him, the use of AI in defense is okay, but certain limits must not be crossed. ABC News reports that the Trump administration, which is aggressively pushing for the use of AI in the US military, may not be following all of those policies.

Although Trump’s administration is moving fast on AI and defense, efforts are underway to ensure responsible use. However, during his speech, Hegseth said, “We would not employ AI models that won’t allow you to fight wars.” 

The suggestion to drop AI systems that fail to support war aligns with his vision for military AI systems. The vision, he said, is a metric the Pentagon would judge adopted AI models with: 

“We would judge AI models on this standard alone: factually accurate, mission relevant, without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications.”

Backing Musk’s anti-woke activism, which he said is absent in Grok, the Defense Secretary added that “The Department of War AI will not be woke.”

For more on Elon Musk’s AI ambitions, see how Tesla’s Optimus robot could soon outperform human surgeons in the OR.

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