Hegseth Announces Elon Musk's Grok Will Run on Pentagon Networks

Speaking at SpaceX headquarters in South Texas on January 12, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Elon Musk's Grok chatbot would be integrated into Pentagon networks alongside Google's generative AI as part of an "AI acceleration strategy." Hegseth said the department would make "all appropriate data" from military IT systems and intelligence databases available to the models, with deployment slated for later that month.

The announcement was made at a facility owned by Musk, whose companies hold billions of dollars in federal contracts, and it came days after Grok generated non-consensual sexually explicit deepfake imagery, prompting Malaysia and Indonesia to block access and the United Kingdom to open a safety inquiry. The model had drawn separate scrutiny in July 2025 over antisemitic outputs. The arrangement also marked a departure from prior federal guardrails restricting AI systems from applications implicating civil rights or nuclear command decisions.

A formal agreement between xAI and the Defense Department covering Grok's use in classified systems was reported in February 2026, and Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jon Ossoff subsequently pressed Hegseth for details on xAI's access.