· Government action
Sen. Warren questions Pentagon's $200m xAI award; Pentagon later moves to put Grok on its networks
What he said or did
Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth questioning a $200 million Pentagon agreement with Musk's xAI, one of four such awards announced in July 2025, and asked whether officials discussed it with Musk while he was a special government employee (Warren press release; DefenseScoop).
Background
The award followed Grok's antisemitic posts in July 2025. Warren called the xAI contract uniquely troubling
compared with the awards to Anthropic, Google and OpenAI (DefenseScoop).
Official response
A Pentagon spokesperson said the department responds directly to the author
; xAI did not respond (DefenseScoop).
What happened next
On 12 January 2026, in a speech at SpaceX in Texas, Hegseth said Grok would go live inside Pentagon networks that month: Very soon we will have the world's leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network
(AP). The announcement came days after global criticism of Grok-generated sexualised deepfakes.
Sources
- Office of Sen. Elizabeth Warren10 Sep 2025
- DefenseScoop11 Sep 2025
- Associated Press (via News4JAX)12 Jan 2026 · Archived copy
This entry records what was publicly said or done, as reported by the sources above. Quotes are attributed to the person who made them.
