Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence, the AI system “Grok,” was used in the US strikes on Iran. The information emerged from a US government legal document.
The US Justice Department disclosed the information in response to an environmental lawsuit over the gas turbines used at a large data center belonging to xAI, the company of Elon Musk, the world’s first trillionaire.
The United States argued that shutting off the data center’s electricity supply because of the environmental lawsuit would threaten US national, economic and energy security, because the AI invention is being used directly in conducting and supporting the operations of the US war department.
The Pentagon’s chief AI officer, Stanley, said in a sworn statement to the court that Grok was already being used in “Project Maven,” the US military’s AI-assisted target-identification program.
He further said that, during “Operation Epic Fury,” Project Maven’s smart systems enabled US forces, in just 96 hours, to fire more than 2,000 rounds of ammunition and missiles at 2,000 separate targets.
A Pentagon official praised Grok highly, acknowledging that Musk’s technology and the special “Grok Gov model” had played a highly effective role in the operation.
The project was initially run using Anthropic’s “Claude” model. But after Anthropic declined to allow its technology to be used to carry out fully autonomous attacks and for extensive surveillance of US citizens, the US government canceled its contract with Anthropic at the end of February. The Pentagon then turned to rival companies such as Google, OpenAI and xAI. Although hundreds of staff at Google and other firms strongly protested the use of AI in the military’s covert operations, the transition to this military AI technology has taken time to fully succeed. As a result, the government was forced to admit in March that the “Claude” model was still being used in the war against Iran.
Meanwhile, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a civil rights organization, has sued Musk’s xAI for violating the Clean Air Act. It alleges that around a dozen turbines were run without any permit, spreading extensive pollution in predominantly Black areas. xAI, however, contends that the turbines are temporary and movable and therefore do not fall under the regulations.
Elon Musk, a close ally of US President Donald Trump, merged xAI with his space research company SpaceX last February in what became the largest IPO in history on June 12.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report