War in the Middle East: The Pentagon used Musk’s AI in US strikes against Iran

In the war in the Middle East, the United States could count on Grok’s help. Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence was used in the strikes against Iran, reveals the American executive in a legal brief defending the gas turbines of a giant data center of the company xAI, targeted by an environmental complaint.

In a brief filed Monday, the Department of Justice argues that this complaint “threatens the national, economic and energy security” of the country, by risking cutting off power to AI infrastructure now used by the army.

AI has become essential for the army

To support its argument, the ministry called Cameron Stanley, head of AI at the Pentagon, to testify. He declares under oath that a tool derived from Grok, the “Grok Gov Model”, is already deployed within Project Maven, the army’s AI-assisted targeting program, initially based on Anthropic’s Claude model.

According to this statement, Maven’s processes “enabled US forces to deploy more than 2,000 munitions on 2,000 separate targets in 96 hours” during the war against Iran. The senior official sees in these figures “testimony to a very large increase in operational efficiency made possible by the Grok Gov Model”, without specifying whether it is the only model used by this program. Cameron Stanley also claims that Maven users consume “nearly 2 billion tokens” (computing units) “per day”, or “up to 6 million pages” processed, a volume which he says makes xAI’s computing infrastructure essential.

The turbines targeted by the complaint power Colossus 2, an xAI supercomputer which drives Grok, on the outskirts of Memphis. The NAACP, a civil rights association, is suing xAI, accusing it of operating dozens of turbines without a permit, in violation of the Clean Air Act. xAI maintains for its part that its turbines are temporary and mobile, and that they are therefore not subject to these regulations.

A standoff with Anthropic

At the end of February, the government broke its contracts with Anthropic, which refused to allow its tools to be used for fully automated strikes or mass surveillance of the Americans. The Pentagon then turned to Google, OpenAI and xAI, the three other American cutting-edge AI companies. But this transition takes time and the government had to admit in March that Claude continued to be used for the war in Iran.

Our file on the War in the Middle East

The military use of AI is controversial. At Google, more than 600 employees demanded in April not to provide AI to the army for classified operations. The group had already given up on Maven in 2018 under pressure from its engineers.