The US Department of Defense has confirmed that it used a customized version of Grok, the xAI chatbot owned by Elon Musk, in military activity in Iran, according to documents and testimony filed in a Mississippi court and reported by Ynet. The disclosure came in a lawsuit against xAI over pollution allegations linked to the company’s server farms in Mississippi.
Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, testified that keeping the system running is a matter of “utmost national security.” He said the system helped guide the firing of more than 2,000 munitions at thousands of targets within 96 hours. The testimony is among the first explicit acknowledgments by a senior US official that a commercial AI model was used in a large-scale military operation.
Stanley said Grok is one of several models that can support national security applications, and that a specialized version called Grok Gov was built for federal agencies and includes capabilities not available in the public model. He added that the data centers running AI systems for the government are an important strategic tool for preserving the United States’ technological edge over its rivals, and warned that a court ruling limiting the model’s deployment could seriously affect Pentagon capabilities.
The revelation has drawn sharp criticism in the United States, especially amid earlier reports about an Iran strike with many civilian casualties and analyst assessments that AI-based targeting may have been used alongside human error. In response, several Democratic senators are advancing legislation to restrict military use of artificial intelligence. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s proposal would require that life-and-death decisions remain with human commanders, not AI systems, and she warned that the Pentagon is rapidly integrating powerful AI with no clear limits. Separately, the Pentagon is also fighting a different legal battle over the use of Anthropic’s AI tools after the company and the government failed to agree on restrictions for military use.
