Trump's Pentagon is embracing Musk's Grok AI chatbot as it draws global outcry

https://apnews.com/article/artificial-intelligence-pentagon-hegseth-musk-7f99e5f32ec70d7e39cec92d2a4ec862

Pentagon is embracing Musk’s Grok AI chatbot as it draws global outcry
By KONSTANTIN TOROPIN and DAVID KLEPPER
Updated 10:54 PM CST, January 12, 2026

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok will join Google’s generative AI engine in operating inside the Pentagon network, as part of a broader push to feed as much of the military’s data as possible into the developing technology.

“Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said in a speech at Musk’s space flight company, SpaceX, in South Texas.

The announcement comes just days after Grok — which is embedded into X, the social media network owned by Musk — drew global outcry and scrutiny for generating highly sexualized deepfake images of people without their consent.

Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked Grok, while the U.K.’s independent online safety watchdog announced an investigation Monday. Grok has limited image generation and editing to paying users.

Hegseth said Grok will go live inside the Defense Department later this month and announced that he would “make all appropriate data” from the military’s IT systems available for “AI exploitation.” He also said data from intelligence databases would be fed into AI systems.

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