Despite growing global condemnation of the role that Grok, the AI chatbot owned by Elon Musk, has played in the creation of nonconsensual sexual material, the Pentagon announced on Monday that it will be used in military operations.
“Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a speech at SpaceX, which is also owned by Musk. Hegseth said Grok would be given access to military data for “AI exploitation” and that the Pentagon’s AI “will not be woke.”
The announcement comes as governments across the world have condemned Grok for allowing users to produce nonconsensual sexual imagery, including photos of minor children. Grok is under fire from the governments of the United Kingdom, Germany, and India.
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Both Malaysia and Indonesia have blocked access to Grok, citing the production of the offending images. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Grok’s behavior has been “disgusting” and “disgraceful.”
The U.S. government has not said or done anything directly regarding Grok and nonconsensual imagery, but the State Department under Secretary Marco Rubio has threatened the United Kingdom and said the nation could face retaliation if it bans X (formerly Twitter) over the Grok-produced images.
Grok is allowing users to submit images of people and request that they be manipulated to show the subject in a bikini and sexualized poses, without their consent. Women have been the target of the vast majority of these requests and some victims have been under the age of 18.
“People saw it was upsetting me and I didn’t like it and they kept doing more and more. There’s one of me just completely naked with just a bit of string around my waist, one with a ball gag in my mouth and my eyes rolled back. The fact these were able to be generated is mental,” said a woman identified as Evie in an interview with The Guardian newspaper.
Grok is also being used to produce images of Renee Good, the Minnesota woman who was killed by an ICE agent. Images of the mother with bullet holes in her bloodied body are being generated by the bot.
Some of the images being created by Musk’s bot can be classified as child sexual abuse material , otherwise known as CSAM.
Not only does Hegseth’s announcement entangle sensitive military systems with a porn-producing bot, but the alliance also further entangles one of President Donald Trump’s most prominent political donors with the federal government.
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Musk is a conspiracy theorist who has expressed sympathy with antisemitic ideas and rhetoric. He has already committed to spending millions to back the Republican Party in this year’s midterm elections, adding to the millions he spent to elect Trump in 2024.
Republicans already have a longstanding pedophilia problem, even before the Trump administration acted to cover up files from the investigation into accused sex trafficker and former Trump pal Jeffrey Epstein. Now that problem has spread to the Pentagon and the U.S. military under its jurisdiction.
