US government: Elon Musk’s AI tool Grok used to attack Iran

The United States government said in a legal filing seen by AFP on Tuesday that strikes against Iran were launched using Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence program Grok.

June 15 brief defends the gas turbines used by a huge data centre belonging to the trillionaire’s company xAI, targeted by an environmental complaint.

The US Department of Justice said in the brief that “the lawsuit threatens American national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations.”

Federal prosecutors also called Pentagon AI head Cameron Stanley, who testified under oath that Grok is already in use in Project Maven, the US military’s AI-assisted targeting tool that was first driven by Anthropic’s Claude model.

Stanley’s statement said the project’s Maven Smart Systems (MSS) “enabled US forces to strike more than 2,000 munitions at 2,000 different targets in 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.”

Stanley commended Musk’s technology and “the substantially improved operational efficiency offered by the Grok Gov Model.”

The NAACP, a civil rights group fighting for the rights of Black Americans, is suing xAI, saying it’s operating dozens of turbines without permits and breaking the Clean Air Act.

The rights group believes they pollute majority-Black neighbourhoods. But xAI says the turbines are transitory and transportable, and therefore not subject to regulation.

In late February, the government terminated its contracts with Anthropic because it refused to permit its technologies to be utilised for fully automated attacks or the bulk surveillance of Americans.

The Pentagon then turned to Anthropic’s competitors such as Google, OpenAI and xAI to continue its quest for AI.

More than 600 Google employees have called on the firm not to deploy AI to the military for sensitive operations. Some people have wider worries about the risks of AI.

But the US military’s move to AI is slow and in March the government had to admit that Claude was still being used to fight the war in Iran.

A close confidant of President Donald Trump, Musk rolled xAI into his space exploration company SpaceX in February and on June 12 it went public in the largest IPO in history.