Edited and reviewed by Tibi Puiu Credit: @SecWar/X On Monday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Elon Musk, will soon operate inside Pentagon networks. The system will run alongside Google’s generative AI tools, reaching both classified and unclassified military systems. “Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said, speaking at SpaceX headquarters in Texas, as per Associated Press. The rollout, expected later this month, marks a sharp acceleration in how the U.S. military plans to use AI. It also arrives at a moment when Grok is under intense scrutiny abroad for generating sexualized and violent imagery. A Mashup of Big Words Hegseth framed the move as part of a new “AI acceleration strategy” at the Department of War (formarely Department of Defense), which he said would “unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus on investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI and that it grows more dominant into the future,” as per The Guardian. It’s all about the data. Hegseth said he has directed the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office to make military data widely available for what he called “AI exploitation,” including information from intelligence systems. “AI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we’re going to make sure that it’s there,” he said. For years, defense officials have argued that the Pentagon sits atop one of the world’s richest data troves, drawn from decades of logistics, surveillance, and combat operations. The challenge has been turning that information into usable insight without compromising security or civil liberties. In December, the Defense Department selected Google’s Gemini model to power its internal AI platform, GenAI.mil, which provides generative tools for military personnel. Grok will now join that ecosystem, alongside systems developed by Anthropic and OpenAI under contracts worth up to $200 million. ×