Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence tool, Grok, has been used in military strikes against Iran, according to a United States government legal briefing seen by Agence France-Presse (AFP) on Tuesday.
The 15 June brief defends the gas turbines powering a giant data centre owned by Musk’s company, xAI. The facilities are currently the target of an environmental lawsuit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights organisation defending Black Americans’ rights.
The group accuses the firm of operating dozens of unpermitted turbines in violation of the Clean Air Act, polluting majority-Black neighbourhoods. Musk’s team contends the turbines are temporary and mobile, making them exempt from regulation.
In the brief, the US Department of Justice argued that shutting down the power supply threatens national security by disrupting AI innovation supporting military operations. Federal prosecutors presented sworn testimony from Pentagon AI chief Cameron Stanley, confirming Grok’s integration into Project Maven the US military’s AI-assisted targeting programme.
Project Maven’s Smart Systems “enabled US forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury”, Stanley’s statement revealed. He praised the “greatly increased operational efficiency” delivered by the “Grok Gov Model”.
Grok and other competitor tools from OpenAI and Google became the Pentagon’s primary focus after it terminated its contract with Anthropic in February. Anthropic had refused to allow its Claude model to be used for fully automated strikes or mass domestic surveillance. This military transition has faced internal resistance elsewhere; at Google, more than 600 employees have demanded the company withhold AI tools from classified military operations.
Musk, a close ally of President Donald Trump, folded his AI venture into SpaceX in February, which recently executed the largest IPO in history on 12 June.
