Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) despatched a letter to Protection Secretary Pete Hegseth on Monday expressing concern over the Pentagon’s choice to provide Elon Musk’s firm xAI entry to categorised networks.
“Grok, the controversial AI mannequin developed by xAI, has offered disturbing outputs for customers, together with giving customers ‘recommendation on learn how to commit murders and terrorist assaults,’ producing antisemitic content material, and creating youngster sexual abuse materials,” the letter reads.
Warren mentioned Grok’s “obvious lack of ample guardrails” may pose “severe dangers to the protection of U.S. navy personnel and to the cybersecurity of categorised methods.” She demanded Hegseth present data on how the Division of Protection plans to “mitigate these potential nationwide safety dangers.”
Warren isn’t the primary to precise alarm at Grok, xAI’s controversial chatbot, having access to categorised methods. Final month, a coalition of nonprofits urged the federal government to right away droop the deployment of Grok in federal businesses, together with the DoD, after X customers repeatedly prompted the chatbot to show actual images of ladies, and in some circumstances youngsters, into sexualized photos with out their consent. The identical day Warren despatched her letter, a category motion lawsuit was filed towards xAI alleging Grok had generated sexual content material from actual photos of the plaintiffs as minors.
The letter comes within the aftermath of the Pentagon’s choice to label Anthropic a provide chain danger after the AI agency refused to provide the navy unrestricted entry to its AI methods. Anthropic had been, till not too long ago, the one AI firm with classified-ready methods. Within the midst of that battle, the DoD signed an settlement with OpenAI in addition to xAI to make use of the 2 corporations’ AI methods in categorised networks, based on Axios.
A senior Pentagon official confirmed that Grok was onboarded for use in a categorised setting, however will not be but getting used.
“It’s unclear what assurances or documentation xAI has offered to the Division of Protection about Grok’s safety safeguards, data-handling practices, or security controls, and whether or not DoD has evaluated these assurances earlier than reportedly permitting Grok entry to categorised system,” Warren writes.
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Warren requested a replica of the deal reportedly reached between the DoD and xAI on using Grok in categorised methods and a proof of how the division plans to make sure Grok will not be uncovered to cyberattacks and can “not leak delicate or categorised navy data.”
(Final week, a former worker of Musk’s Division of Authorities Effectivity reportedly stole Individuals’ private information from the Social Safety Administration and saved it on a thumb drive — the newest accusation of DOGE-related information leakage.)
Chief Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell mentioned the division “appears to be like ahead to deploying Grok to its official AI platform GenAI.mil within the very close to future.”
GenAI.mil is the navy’s safe enterprise platform for generative AI that provides DoD employees entry to massive language fashions (LLMs) and different AI instruments inside government-approved cloud environments. It’s designed to assist with primarily non-classified duties like analysis, doc drafting, and information evaluation.
