Pentagon confirms Elon Musk's Grok AI was used for targeting in Iran strikes, court filing reveals

The disclosure

The US Department of Justice revealed in a legal memorandum that Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok was used during military strikes on Iran. The filing, dated 15 June and reviewed by AFP, was submitted to defend gas turbines powering an xAI data centre in Tennessee that faces an environmental lawsuit from civil rights organisation NAACP. The department argues the lawsuit "threatens the national, economic and energy security" of the United States because it risks cutting power to AI infrastructure now used by the armed forces.

Project Maven deployment

Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon's head of AI, stated under oath that a tool derived from Grok, called the "Grok Gov Model", is already deployed within Project Maven. Project Maven is the military's AI-assisted targeting identification and selection programme, which was initially built on Anthropic's Claude model. The sworn statement describes how Maven processes "enabled US forces to deploy more than 2,000 munitions on 2,000 distinct targets in 96 hours" during the war against Iran.

“These numbers testify to a very large increase in operational efficiency made possible by the Grok Gov Model.”

Operational scale

Stanley did not specify whether Grok was the only model used by Project Maven. The memorandum also notes that Grok is one of four advanced AI models capable of supporting national security applications. According to the Pentagon official, Maven users consume "nearly 2 billion tokens" of computation per day, equivalent to "up to 6 million pages" processed, a volume that he says makes xAI's computing infrastructure indispensable.

The environmental lawsuit

The turbines targeted by the complaint power Colossus 2, an xAI supercomputer on the outskirts of Memphis that trains Grok. The NAACP alleges that xAI operates dozens of gas turbines without permits, in violation of the Clean Air Act, causing pollution in predominantly Black neighbourhoods. xAI maintains that its turbines are temporary and mobile, and therefore not subject to those regulations.

The Anthropic contract

In late February, the US government ended its contracts with Anthropic after the company refused to allow its tools to be used for lethal strikes. The Grok Gov Model subsequently filled that role within Project Maven.