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Pentagon used Elon Musk’s Grok AI to fire 2,000 missiles at Iran, official says<br>Top defense official says data centers powering trillionaire’s chatbot are critical to national security

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Donald Trump’s administration turned to Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot to launch thousands of missiles in Iran, according to a top defense official.<br>In a sworn statement defending the trillionaire from a lawsuit alleging xAI data centers are illegally polluting Black communities, the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence chief said the chatbot’s continued operation is “a matter of paramount national security” — and was used to fire more than “2,000 munitions at 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours.”<br>Grok, a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI, is among four AI models “currently capable of supporting national security applications,” according to Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer.

The chatbot is also one of three products “equipped to support mission-critical operations” in top secret settings, Stanley wrote.<br>The filing appears to be the first explicit admission from an administration official that the government is using Musk’s AI to bomb Iran, joining several other AI systems that have come under intense scrutiny after U.S.-led attacks killed hundreds of civilians, including children.

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xAI’s Grok chatbot has been used to fire more than 2,000 munitions in Iran, according to a top Pentagon official (Reuters)<br>U.S. military investigators believe American forces were likely responsible for a strike on an Iranian girl’s school in Minab that killed at least 175 people, mostly children, in what analysts and human rights officials believe is the deadliest incident for civilian casualties since the U.S. and Israeli forces began attacking the country in February.

Outside analysts have suggested that the Pentagon’s AI-driven targeting — in addition to human error that failed to check whether target maps were up to date — may have played a role in the bombing.<br>The targets for Operation Epic Fury were identified with the aid of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency’s Maven Smart System, which uses AI to lay out data on a dashboard to support officials in their decision-making.

Those AI products do not explicitly create targets but work within Maven to identify potential points of interest for military intelligence.<br>In court filings on Monday, the Pentagon said it relies on xAI’s Grok Gov Model, a suite of products designed to work with federal agencies with features “found in no other frontier AI model,” according to Stanley.

The Pentagon would be “severely” impacted by a court ruling that prevents xAI from being “deployed, refined and upgraded” across the Pentagon, according to the Department of Justice.<br>open image in gallery

The Pentagon’s use of AI has come under intense scrutiny after members of Congress and outside military analysts questioned whether faulty intelligence led to strikes that killed hundreds of civilians, including children (Reuters)<br>The Trump administration is asking a federal judge in Mississippi to toss out a lawsuit brought by the NAACP, which claims Musk’s xAI is violating the Clean Air Act by running dozens of gas-burning turbines despite lacking permits for them.<br>The NAACP alleges that xAI operates at least 57 turbines being used to power its Colossus 2 data center without pollution controls required by the Clean Air Act.<br>That data center and others are “well positioned” to provide a “critical surge” in energy capacity in the event of an “armed conflict or other exigent...