Warren pressures the Pentagon on the decision to give xAI access to classified networks

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, a controversial AI model developed by xAI, has provided disturbing results to users, including giving users ‘advice on how to commit murder and terrorist attacks,’ generating illegal content, and creating child sexual abuse,” the letter reads.

Warren said Grok’s “apparent lack of adequate safeguards” could pose “significant risks to the security of the US military and to the cyber security of classified systems.” He asked Hegseth to provide details on how the Department of Defense plans to “mitigate these potential threats to national security.”

Warren is not the first to express alarm over Grok, xAI’s controversial chatbot, gaining access to classified systems. Last month, a coalition of non-profit organizations called on the government to immediately halt the deployment of Grok to government agencies, including the DoD, after X users again encouraged the chatbot to turn real images of women, and in some cases children, into pornographic images without their consent. On the same day that Warren sent his letter, a class action lawsuit was filed against xAI alleging that Grok produced sexual content from actual photographs of the plaintiffs as children.

The letter comes on the heels 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, until recently, was the only AI company with classification-ready systems. In the midst of that dispute, the DoD signed an agreement with OpenAI and xAI to use the two companies’ AI systems on decentralized networks, according to Axios.

A senior Pentagon official confirmed that the Grok was on board for use in a planned area, but has not yet been deployed.

“It is unclear what assurances or documents xAI provided to the Department of Defense regarding Grok’s security, data management practices, or security controls, and whether DoD reviewed those assurances before it reportedly allowed Grok access to the classified system,” Warren wrote.

Warren requested a copy of the agreement reportedly reached between the DoD and xAI regarding the use of Grok in classified programs and an explanation of how the department plans to ensure that 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 the personal data of Americans from the Social Security Administration and stored it in six — the latest in a series of alleged DOGE-related data leaks.)

Chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said the department “looks forward to deploying Grok to its official AI site GenAI.mil in the near future.”

GenAI.mil is a secure business platform for military generative AI that gives DoD personnel access to large-scale linguistic models (LLMs) and other AI tools within government-authorized cloud environments. It is designed to assist with primarily unclassified tasks such as research, documentation, and data analysis.