Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday expressing concern over the Pentagon’s decision to give Elon Musk’s company xAI access to classified networks.
“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 said 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.” She demanded Hegseth provide information on how the Department of Defense plans to “mitigate these potential national security risks.”
Warren isn’t the first to express alarm at Grok, xAI’s controversial chatbot, gaining access to classified systems. Last month, a coalition of nonprofits urged the government to immediately suspend the deployment of Grok in federal agencies, including the DoD, after X users repeatedly prompted the chatbot to turn real photos of women, and in some cases children, into sexualized images without their consent. The same day Warren sent her letter, a class action lawsuit was filed against xAI alleging Grok had generated sexual content from real images of the plaintiffs as minors.
The letter comes in the aftermath of the Pentagon’s decision to label Anthropic a supply chain risk after the AI firm refused to give the military unrestricted access to its AI systems. Anthropic had been, until recently, the only AI company with classified-ready systems. In the midst of that conflict, the DoD signed an agreement with OpenAI as well as xAI to use the two companies’ AI systems in classified networks, according to Axios.
A senior Pentagon official confirmed that Grok was onboarded to be used in a classified setting, but is not yet being used.
“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 writes.
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Warren requested a copy of the deal reportedly reached between the DoD and xAI on the use of Grok in classified systems and an explanation of how the department plans to ensure Grok is not exposed to cyberattacks and will “not leak sensitive or classified military information.”
(Last week, a former employee of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency reportedly stole Americans’ personal data from the Social Security Administration and stored it on a thumb drive — the latest accusation of DOGE-related data leakage.)
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell said the department “looks forward to deploying Grok to its official AI platform GenAI.mil in the very near future.”
GenAI.mil is the military’s secure enterprise platform for generative AI that gives DoD workers access to large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools within government-approved cloud environments. It is designed to help with primarily non-classified tasks like research, document drafting, and data analysis.
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