The US Department of Justice has asked a federal court to throw out a Clean Air Act lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI, arguing that the company’s unpermitted gas turbines near Memphis are a matter of “national, economic, and energy security.”
The move puts the Trump administration in court alongside Musk to defend dozens of methane-burning turbines that have been running without air permits in one of the most polluted regions of the country.
The Trump administration is trying to help Elon Musk's xAI Corp. beat a Clean Air Act lawsuit filed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The US said the NAACP lawsuit threatens an xAI data center that powers Grok systems needed by the military.
The NAACP sued xAI and subsidiary MZX Tech in April, alleging that they violated the Clean Air Act by operating 27 gas turbines without an air permit in Southaven, Mississippi. The number of unpermitted turbines rose to 57 by mid-May and there were plans to install two more, the NAACP said in a June 12 filing.
"Defendants’ Colossus Gas Plant powers xAI’s nearby Colossus 2 data center, which in turn powers the chatbot 'Grok,'" the lawsuit said. The gas turbines have fueled both health concerns and noise complaints.
A so-called software supply chain attack, in which hackers corrupt a legitimate piece of software to hide their own malicious code, was once a relatively rare event but one that haunted the cybersecurity world with its insidious threat of turning any innocent application into a dangerous foothold in a victim’s network. Now one group of cybercriminals has turned that occasional nightmare into a near-weekly episode, corrupting hundreds of open source tools, extorting victims for profit, and sowing a new level of distrust in an entire ecosystem used to create the world’s software.
On Tuesday night, open source code platform GitHub announced that it had been breached by hackers in one such software supply chain attack: A GitHub developer had installed a “poisoned” extension for VSCode, a plug-in for a commonly used code editor that, like GitHub itself, is owned by Microsoft. As a result, the hackers behind the breach, an increasingly notorious group called TeamPCP, claim to have accessed around 4,000 of GitHub’s code repositories. GitHub’s statement confirmed that it had found at least 3,800 compromised repositories while noting that, based on its findings so far, they all contained GitHub’s own code, not that of customers.
“We are here today to advertise GitHub’s source code and internal orgs for sale,” TeamPCP wrote on BreachForums, a forum and marketplace for cybercriminals. “Everything for the main platform is there and I very am happy to send samples to interested buyers to verify absolute authenticity.”
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