Raising concerns over national security and AI safety, Senator Elizabeth Warren has sought answers from the Pentagon regarding its decision to allow Elon Musk’s company xAI access to classified networks. In a letter sent to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday, Warren flagged potential risks linked to the deployment of the company’s AI chatbot, Grok.
“Grok, the controversial AI model developed by xAI, has provided disturbing outputs for users, including giving users ‘advice on how to commit murders and terrorist attacks,’ generating antisemitic content and creating child sexual abuse material,” the letter reads. Warren warned that Grok’s “apparent lack of adequate guardrails” could pose “serious risks to the safety of U.S. military personnel and to the cybersecurity of classified systems,” and asked how the Department of Defense plans to “mitigate these potential national security risks.”
Concerns around Grok are not new. Last month, a coalition of nonprofits called for an immediate halt to its use across federal agencies, including the DoD, after reports that users prompted the chatbot to create sexualized images of real women and, in some cases, children without consent. On the same day Warren sent her letter, a class action lawsuit was filed against xAI, alleging Grok generated sexual content from real images of plaintiffs when they were minors. The scrutiny follows the Pentagon’s earlier decision to label Anthropic a supply chain risk after it refused to grant unrestricted access to its AI systems. The DoD has since signed agreements with both OpenAI and xAI to deploy their AI tools in classified environments.
A senior Pentagon official confirmed that Grok has been onboarded for classified use but is not yet active. “It is unclear what assurances or documentation xAI has provided to the Department of Defense about Grok’s security safeguards, data-handling practices, or safety controls and whether DoD has evaluated those assurances before reportedly allowing Grok access to classified system,” Warren wrote. She has requested details of the agreement and measures to ensure the system is protected from cyberattacks and does not leak sensitive military data. Meanwhile, Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the department “looks forward to deploying Grok to its official AI platform GenAI.mil in the very near future,” a secure platform designed mainly for non-classified tasks like research, drafting and data analysis.
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