Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Monday that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok will be added to Google’s generative AI engine in a plan to run the technology inside Pentagon networks, as part of what he described as a broader effort to feed military data into developing AI systems.
Hegseth made the announcement during a speech at SpaceX in South Texas, according to the Associated Press. He said “very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” adding that the Pentagon would make “all appropriate data” from the military’s IT systems available for “AI exploitation.”
He also said that data from intelligence databases would be fed into AI systems. During the same speech, Hegseth described the Pentagon as possessing “combat-proven operational data from two decades of military and intelligence operations,” and said, “AI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we’re going to make sure that it’s there.”
The defense secretary said he wants innovation within the military to come “from anywhere and evolve with speed and purpose.” He also said he was shrugging off any AI models “that won’t allow you to fight wars,” while laying out what he described as an approach for military AI “without ideological constraints that limit lawful military applications.”
Hegseth said the Pentagon’s “AI will not be woke,” and in his remarks contrasted the posture he described for the department with the Biden administration’s earlier stance on AI use. The AP reported that the Biden administration enacted a late-2024 framework directing national security agencies to expand their use of advanced AI systems, while prohibiting some uses, including applications that would violate constitutionally protected civil rights or systems that would automate the deployment of nuclear weapons. The AP said it was unclear if those prohibitions remained in place under the Trump administration.
The announcement also came after days of global outcry and scrutiny of Grok tied to the generation of sexualized deepfake images of people without their consent, according to the AP. The AP said Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked Grok, while the United Kingdom’s independent online safety watchdog announced an investigation Monday. The AP also reported that Grok limits image generation and editing to paying users.
The AP said Musk developed and pitched Grok as an alternative to what he described as “woke AI” interactions from rival chatbots such as Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The outlet said Grok had faced controversy in July after it appeared to make antisemitic comments praising Adolf Hitler and to share antisemitic posts.
The AP reported that the Pentagon did not immediately respond to questions about issues with Grok.