The Pentagon is set to deploy Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok across its military networks later this month, despite growing global criticism over the tool’s recent controversies, reports UNB.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Monday that Grok will be introduced inside the Department of Defense and will operate on both unclassified and classified networks alongside Google’s generative AI system.
“Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said while speaking at Musk’s space company SpaceX in South Texas.
The move comes only days after Grok faced strong backlash for generating highly sexualised deepfake images of people without their consent. Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked the chatbot, while the United Kingdom’s independent online safety watchdog has launched an investigation. Following the criticism, Grok restricted image generation and editing features to paying users.
Hegseth said the Pentagon would make “all appropriate data” from its IT systems available for what he called “AI exploitation” and added that data from intelligence databases would also be fed into AI systems.
He said the US military needs to speed up technological innovation and remove barriers that slow down development.
“We need innovation to come from anywhere and evolve with speed and purpose,” he said.
The defence secretary noted that the Pentagon holds combat-tested operational data from two decades of military and intelligence operations, stressing that the success of AI depends on the quality of data it receives.
“AI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we’re going to make sure that it’s there,” Hegseth said.
His strong push for AI adoption marks a shift from the more cautious approach taken by the previous Biden administration, which supported AI use across federal agencies but warned of possible misuse.
In late 2024, the Biden administration introduced a framework encouraging national security agencies to expand their use of advanced AI systems while banning certain applications, including those that could violate civil rights or automate the deployment of nuclear weapons. It is still unclear whether those restrictions remain in place under the Trump administration.
Bd-pratidin English/TR
