Grok Is More Important Than Clean Air, DOJ Says – Mother Jones

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Grok has been used to target missiles at Iran, Pentagon officials acknowledged.Kevin Dietsch/Getty

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The federal government intervened Monday in a Clean Air Act lawsuit in which people in Memphis, Tennessee, and Southaven, Mississippi, are suing Elon Musk’s xAI over the health risks posed by the company’s unpermitted gas turbines.

The Department of Justice didn’t intervene on behalf of the people breathing dirty air, though: instead, it submitted an unprecedented motion backing xAI.

The suit, filed by NAACP lawyers, contends that xAI should owe over $100,000 a day in civil penalties for violating the Clean Air Act. DOJ is pushing for the suit to be thrown out—not on the facts of the case, but because, the agency claims, Americans need Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot for our continued safety.

"I can’t live like this. I don’t really know what my options are other than to get out of there."

xAI’s massive Colossus 2 data center, in the Memphis area, was built primarily to train Grok models—new iterations of the AI that might be best known for calling itself “MechaHitler.” And it has onsite dozens of unpermitted gas turbines to serve its massive energy needs. Colossus 2’s power plant constitutes one of the largest industrial sources of smog-forming nitrogen oxides in the nation, able to emit well over 5,000 tons per year. People living near the site say they’re plagued with poor air quality and constant noise.

"I can’t live like this. I don’t really know what my options are other than to get out of there," said Jason Haley, who lives near one of xAI’s Memphis-area sites, to the local Fox News affiliate. He described constant whirring noises from the data center. "But, with that being said, I don’t know who would be willing to purchase that house if they come and look at it and that’s what they’re hearing."

“Grok’s continued operation and availability is a matter of paramount national security,” the filing said, especially “in the event of armed conflict”—adding that the Department of War used Grok to “deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.”

Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s AI chief, added in a declaration that “If xAI is hindered from continuing to improve and upgrade Grok…DoW’s ability to meet its national security mission and keep pace with adversaries will be impaired.” The Pentagon has paid Musk’s company at least $200 million for use of the chatbot.

But according to Laura Thoms, who worked at the Department of Justice for 19 years before moving to the advocacy group Earthjustice, the DOJ’s action—directly inserting itself into a case on behalf of a corporation—is likely unprecedented. (Earthjustice is part of the suit against xAI, alongside the Southern Environmental Law Center and the NAACP.)

“In my experience, I have never known the government to intervene on behalf of the defendant to argue that enforcement shouldn’t happen at all,” Thoms said.

“They’re saying that when we, the federal government, decide that a company should be able to continue violating for whatever reason, there’s nothing anyone can do about it—not the communities that are impacted by the pollution, not the courts, not even Congress,” Thoms added, calling the move a “power grab…to decide who has to comply with the law and who can be given a free pass,” undercutting one of the main tools communities have against corporate pollution.

Throughout the 20th century, under the legal doctrine of "sovereign immunity," the federal government has historically exempted military bases from much pollution regulation by citing the primacy of national security. Bases like Camp Lejeune in Jacksonville, Florida have leaked volatile organic compounds, jet fuel, and heavy metals into nearby groundwater, rendering them what Abre’ Connor, of the NAACP, calls “sacrifice zones.”

‘National security’ has also been a frequent refrain of the Trump administration’s...