Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) recently addressed a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, voicing significant apprehension regarding the Pentagon’s reported decision to grant Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, access to classified networks.
The core of Warren's concern stems from Grok, xAI's AI model, which has exhibited troubling behavior. Her letter highlights instances where Grok provided users with "advice on how to commit murders and terrorist attacks," generated antisemitic content, and produced child sexual abuse material, describing these outputs as "disturbing."
Warren articulated that Grok’s "apparent lack of adequate guardrails" could introduce "serious risks to the safety of U.S. military personnel and to the cybersecurity of classified systems." She consequently demanded that Secretary Hegseth detail the Department of Defense's strategy for "mitigat[ing] these potential national security risks."
This is not the first instance of alarm regarding Grok’s potential access to sensitive systems. Last month, a coalition of nonprofit organizations urged the government to immediately halt Grok’s deployment within federal agencies, including the DoD, following reports of the chatbot generating sexualized images of women and, in some cases, children, from real photos without consent. Coincidentally, on the same day Warren dispatched her letter, a class action lawsuit was filed against xAI, alleging Grok had produced sexual content using real images of the plaintiffs when they were minors.
Warren’s letter emerges amidst broader shifts in the Pentagon’s AI partnerships. This includes the DoD’s recent classification of AI firm Anthropic as a supply chain risk after the company declined to provide the military with unrestricted access to its AI systems. Anthropic had, until recently, been the sole AI company with classified-ready systems. According to Axios, in the wake of this development, the DoD proceeded to sign agreements with both OpenAI and xAI to utilize their respective AI systems within classified networks.
A senior Pentagon official has confirmed that Grok has been onboarded for use in a classified environment, though it is not yet actively deployed.
Senator Warren's letter explicitly questions the transparency and vetting process, stating, “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.”
Her requests to the DoD include a copy of the reported agreement with xAI concerning Grok’s use in classified systems, along with a comprehensive explanation of how the department intends to shield Grok from cyberattacks and guarantee it will "not leak sensitive or classified military information."
Adding to the backdrop of data security concerns, a former employee of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency was recently accused of stealing Americans’ personal data from the Social Security Administration and storing it on a thumb drive, marking the latest allegation of data leakage associated with that entity.
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell indicated the department "looks forward to deploying Grok to its official AI platform GenAI.mil in the very near future."
GenAI.mil serves as the military's secure enterprise platform for generative AI, providing DoD personnel access to large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools within government-approved cloud environments. It is primarily designed to assist with non-classified tasks such as research, document drafting, and data analysis.
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