Published on 6/17/2026
The US administration has approved the use of the artificial intelligence tool “Grok” of the “XAI” company owned by billionaire Elon Musk in strikes against Iran, according to a legal memorandum seen by Agence France-Presse.
The memo, issued on Monday, defends gas turbines used in a massive data center belonging to XAI, which is facing an environmental lawsuit.
In the memo, the US Department of Justice claimed that the lawsuit “threatens US national, economic, and energy security by seeking to cut off the energy supply to artificial intelligence innovations that support the War Department’s military operations.”
To support this claim, federal prosecutors presented testimony from Cameron Stanley, head of the Artificial Intelligence Division at the Pentagon.
Stanley acknowledged under oath that GROK was already in use within Project Maven, the US Army’s AI-powered targeting program, which was initially based on Anthropic’s CLOUD model.
Stanley’s statement said that the project’s MAVEN smart systems “enabled US forces to deploy more than 2,000 munitions on 2,000 different targets within 96 hours in Operation Epic Fury.” Stanley praised Musk’s technology and the “significantly increased operational efficiency enabled by Grok’s model.”
Clean Air Act
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a human rights organization that defends the rights of black Americans, is suing XAI, accusing it of operating dozens of turbines without licenses, in violation of the Clean Air Act.
The rights group says these turbines pollute predominantly black neighborhoods, while XAI claims the turbines are temporary and mobile, and therefore unregulated.
At the end of last February, the government terminated its contracts with Anthropic after it refused to allow its tools to be used in fully automated strikes or for mass surveillance of Americans.
The Pentagon then turned to Anthropic’s competitors, such as Google, OpenAI, and XAI, to continue its AI endeavors.
At Google, more than 600 employees have demanded that the company not provide the military with artificial intelligence for covert operations, and others have expressed widespread concerns about the risks of artificial intelligence.
Last February, Elon Musk, a close ally of US President Donald Trump, merged XAI into his space exploration company, SpaceX, which carried out the largest public offering on June 12.
