Warren is pressing the Pentagon on the decision to grant AI access to classified networks

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday expressing concern about the Pentagon’s decision to give Elon Musk’s company XAI access to classified networks.

“Grok, the controversial AI model developed by xAI, has provided disturbing results to users, including advising users on how to commit murders and terrorist attacks, generating anti-Semitic content, and creating child sexual abuse material,” the letter said.

Warren said Grok’s “apparent lack of adequate guardrails” could pose “serious risks to the safety of U.S. military personnel and the cybersecurity of classified systems.” Hegseth requested information about how the Department of Defense plans to “mitigate these potential national security risks.”

Warren wasn’t the first to express alarm that Grok, xAI’s controversial chatbot, gained access to secret systems. Last month, a coalition of nonprofits urged the government to immediately suspend Grok’s deployment in federal agencies, including the Department of Defense, after X users repeatedly called out the chatbot for turning real photos of women, and in some cases children, into sexual images without their consent. On the same day Warren sent her letter, a class-action lawsuit was filed against XAI alleging that Grok had created sexual content from real photos of the plaintiffs as minors.

The letter comes on the heels of the Pentagon’s decision to designate Anthropic as a supply chain risk after the AI ​​company refused to give the military unfettered access to its AI systems. Anthropic was, until recently, the only AI company with systems in place for secret classification. Amid this conflict, the Department of Defense signed an agreement with OpenAI and xAI to use the two companies’ AI systems in classified networks, according to Axios.

A senior Pentagon official confirmed that Grock was on board the plane for use in a secret location, but has not yet been used.

“It is unclear what assurances or documentation xAI provided to DoD regarding Grok’s security assurances, data handling practices, or safety controls, and whether DoD evaluated those assurances before allowing Grok access to the classified system,” Warren wrote.

Warren requested a copy of the deal reportedly reached between the Department of Defense and xAI regarding the use of Grok in classified systems and an explanation of how the department plans to ensure that Grok is not vulnerable to cyberattacks and “is not leaking sensitive or classified military information.”

(Last week, a former employee at Musk’s Government Efficiency Administration reportedly stole Americans’ personal data from the Social Security Administration and stored it on a thumb drive — the latest DOGE-related data leak accusation.)

The Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, said the department “looks forward to deploying Grok on its official artificial intelligence platform, GenAI.mil, in the very near future.”

GenAI.mil is the Army’s secure enterprise platform for generative AI that gives DoD personnel access to large language models (LLMs) and other AI tools within government-approved cloud environments. It is designed to assist with primarily non-confidential tasks such as research, document drafting, and data analysis.