Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has addressed a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, raising concerns over the Pentagon’s decision to grant Elon Musk’s company xAI access to classified networks.
In her letter, Warren highlights that Grok, the controversial AI model developed by xAI, has produced alarming outputs, including advising on how to commit murders and terrorist attacks, generating antisemitic content, and creating child sexual abuse material.
Warren argues that Grok’s lack of sufficient safeguards poses significant risks to the safety of U.S. military personnel and the cybersecurity of classified systems. She has requested Hegseth to provide details on how the Department of Defense intends to address these potential national security threats.
This is not the first instance of apprehension regarding Grok’s access to classified systems. Last month, several nonprofits urged the government to halt the deployment of Grok in federal agencies, including the DoD, after reports surfaced of the chatbot being used to generate sexualized images from real photos of women and children without consent. On the same day Warren sent her letter, a class action lawsuit was filed against xAI, accusing Grok of producing sexual content from images of the plaintiffs as minors.
The letter follows the Pentagon’s decision to label Anthropic a supply chain risk after the company refused to grant the military unrestricted access to its AI systems. Previously, Anthropic was the sole AI firm with classified-ready systems. Amid this situation, the DoD signed agreements with OpenAI and xAI to incorporate their AI systems into classified networks, according to Axios.
A senior Pentagon official confirmed that while Grok has been onboarded for use in a classified setting, it is not yet active.
Warren notes that it remains unclear what assurances or documentation xAI has offered to the Department of Defense regarding Grok’s security measures, data-handling practices, or safety controls, and whether these assurances were assessed before reportedly granting Grok access to classified systems.
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Warren has requested a copy of the agreement reportedly reached between the DoD and xAI concerning Grok’s use in classified systems and a detailed explanation of how the department intends to protect Grok from cyberattacks and ensure it does not leak sensitive or classified military information.
Recently, a former employee of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency allegedly stole personal data of Americans from the Social Security Administration and stored it on a thumb drive, marking the latest accusation of DOGE-related data leakage.
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell stated that the department looks forward to deploying Grok on its official AI platform, GenAI.mil, in the near future.
GenAI.mil is the military’s secure enterprise platform for generative AI, providing DoD personnel access to large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools within government-approved cloud environments, primarily for non-classified tasks such as research, document drafting, and data analysis.
