Elon Musk’s AI company is now sitting at the center of a national security storm after a Pentagon official said the Grok Gov Model helped U.S. forces move with stunning speed during the Iran war. In a sworn declaration filed in federal court, Cameron Stanley, the Department of War’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, said xAI’s technology supported military operations through Maven Smart Systems, including targeting, intelligence, readiness and recruitment.
Stanley wrote that the system “enabled U.S. forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury, a testament to the greatly increased operational efficiency made possible by the Grok Gov Model.” That is the kind of sentence that turns a data center lawsuit into a war powers debate real fast.
To be clear, the filing does not say Grok independently chose targets or fired weapons on its own. It says Maven Smart System workflows using the Grok Gov Model enabled U.S. forces to deploy munitions. Still, the scale of that claim is exactly why critics are sounding alarms. When AI compresses battlefield decisions into hours, the question becomes who is checking the machine, who owns the mistake, and whether human judgment is actually leading or just rubber-stamping.
The declaration surfaced because the Justice Department is trying to dismiss a lawsuit from the NAACP and other plaintiffs accusing xAI and MZX Tech of running natural gas turbines tied to the Colossus 2 data center without required air permits. AP reported that the lawsuit alleges the facility creates health risks near homes, schools and churches, while the Justice Department argues the site is critical to the economy and U.S. military operations.
Stanley made the national security argument even sharper, saying xAI uses Colossus 2 to train and upgrade Grok models used by the government. He wrote, “The Grok Gov Model offers features unique to xAI that are found in no other frontier AI model.” He also said preserving xAI’s current data center capacity is “a matter of paramount national security.”
That is where the government AI story gets bigger than Musk. The Pentagon has already built policy around AI in military systems, including a directive requiring autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems to allow commanders and operators to exercise “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.”
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand is pushing for stricter guardrails. Her Secure and Accountable Military AI Act would restrict Pentagon AI use in areas including nuclear weapons, mass domestic surveillance and offensive fully autonomous weapons.
Gillibrand put it plainly: “The most critical decisions affecting our national security and the lives of our service members must always be made by human beings, not unaccountable machines.” She added, “Right now, the Pentagon is moving toward deploying incredibly powerful AI technology without commonsense guardrails in place, which could have catastrophic consequences that make all of us less safe.”
Now the debate is not whether AI is entering government. It already is. The fight is over how much power it gets before Congress, courts and the public fully understand what is happening behind the screen.
