Elon Musk has quietly bought APR Energy, a Jacksonville-based company that operates a fleet of mobile gas and diesel turbines totaling more than 1 GW of generation capacity.
The self-styled champion of a “solar electric economy” now owns a fossil fuel power company — and he’s buying it to feed the electricity-hungry data centers running xAI’s Grok.
It should come as no surprise, then, that its supposed “translation” is a piece of work, too. In April, the almost-trillionaire’s social media platform X instated automatic AI translations for all of its users — and the results certainly speak for themselves.
As writer and author Parker Molloy pointed out in a recent post on Bluesky, the Grok feature is “taking some interesting liberties” with people’s otherwise sincere posts.
Screenshots show how Grok completely botched translations by coming up with shocking and decidedly NSFW AI hallucinations.
One South Korean user, for instance, posted an otherwise tame video of two video game characters, only for the auto-translate feature to allege that it was a “c**shot video with my stepmom.”
“I am not sure it is the right translation,” a taken-aback user replied.
“It isn’t correct at all!” the original poster lamented.
Another post by Portuguese account POPTime shows a video of a man making an elaborate cup of coffee during a flight.
But a purported translation “from Portuguese by Grok” claimed that the video shows a man who is pleasuring himself in public.
“Grok auto translate is inaccurate, text actually translates to ‘Man grinds and brews his own coffee during a commercial flight,’ not ‘Man masturbates and jerks off to his own coffee during commercial flight,'” an appended community note reads.
Another Turkish user, who posted an innocent picture of their young kitten, was horrified after Grok’s translation suggested that they were looking to “f*** our baby.”
“Uhhh the automatic translation makes it alarming,” another user replied.
To the X community, which has already seen its fair share of Grok’s foul-mouthed shenanigans, the AI’s profanity-laden translations were just another bemusing distraction.
But to anybody looking to meaningfully post on social media, the bizarre liberties the chatbot is taking perfectly highlight the sorry state of the microblogging platform. Ever since Musk took over in 2022, users have noted a major uptick in the proliferation of hate speech and disinformation. Researchers have found that X’s AI models are driving online racist abuse.
Grok’s ability to come up with AI images, in particular, has been mired in controversy, from being used to generate nonconsensual nudes of women to a single account that was recently found to have posted thousands of explicit images of an 11-year-old girl.
Musk’s prodigal chatbot, in other words, has been guilty of crimes far worse than expletive-laden translations.
According to boosters of AI, the tech was supposed to usher in an era of unprecedented productivity, leisure time for workers, and scientific discovery. But in reality, it keeps being linked to crimes so ghoulish that they’re almost unbelievable.
In a particularly horrifying example, a man used Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot to generate some 7,000 sexually explicit images of his stepdaughter by feeding the AI a photo of her that was taken when she was 11 years old, a lawsuit alleges.
The allegations, as reported by Ars Technica, were made in a proposed class action lawsuit against xAI — now owned by SpaceX and rebranded as SpaceXAI— which accuses it of building AI tools to “nudify” people without their consent and shielding predators from law enforcement.
According to the suit, brought by a group of girls who say they were victimized by obscene Grok generations, the stepfather’s horrific activity almost went entirely unnoticed by Grok’s safety systems. It failed to flag the countless images depicting incest and rape, per Ars. It was only after a specific prompt for a “gang rape” that it sent a tip to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), who alerted authorities.
But xAI “obstructed” the investigation that followed “at every turn,” the suit alleges. It refused to provide more information on the user behind the requests, including critical identifying details like an IP address. Police tracked down the man anyway, finding a vast collection of AI-generated images of his stepdaughter, identified only as Jane Doe 4. Two days after being released on bail, the man fatally shot himself, upending the young girl’s life even more than he already had.
“Overnight, Jane Doe 4’s entire reality was shattered by the dual tragedies of child sexual exploitation and suicide,” the lawsuit alleged. “Her family was torn apart, and her life became a nightmare.”
Grok’s ability to create sexual deepfakes gained national attention after a several week period in last December and this January when it was used to generate tens of thousands of nonconsensual AI nudes of real women and children. In the aftermath, the firm Copyleaks estimated the bot was generating a nonconsensually sexualized image every single minute. The Center for Counter Digital Hate later estimated that this amounted to around 3,000,000 AI nudes, with more than 23,000 of those images depicting children.
Musk, the CEO and owner of xAI, has denied that Grok has been used to generate CSAM. The company’s immediate response to the outcry was to simply restrict image generation to paying users. Over a week later — as Grok continued to crank out more CSAM and deepfake nudes — xAI said it was implementing stricter guardrails to stop Grok from generating sexual images of real people, without acknowledging the disturbing trend.
The lawsuit also accuses xAI of protecting predators by frustrating law enforcement’s attempts to track them down. In a press release quoted by Ars, the plaintiff’s legal team pointed to NCMEC’s discovery that 90 percent of xAI’s CyberTips weren’t “actionable” because they barely provided information on the flagged users.
“They had everything they needed to help law enforcement stop the person responsible and achieve justice. Instead, they remained silent and allowed this person to use Grok to steal my childhood,” Jane Doe 4 said, per Ars.
Elon Musk told Tesla staff to move to using Grok, the AI model from his own xAI (now folded into SpaceX), according to a memo sent to employees on Friday.
The push comes days after Tesla capped employee spending on third-party AI tools — and it lands even though Musk himself concedes Grok is not as good as its rivals.
Welcome to this week’s installment of The Intelligence Brief… in a recent sworn statement, it was revealed that the Pentagon has reportedly leveraged Elon Musk’s xAI to assist in the launch of as many as 2,000 munitions in the recent U.S. war with Iran. In our coverage, we’ll be looking at 1) how the recent revelations were brought to light in a lawsuit focused on possible violations of the Clean Air Act, 2) how a “frontier” AI chatbot became key part of the Pentagon’s military efforts, and 3) why lawmakers are sounding alarms over the potential misuse of AI systems, and the need for ensuring their safe use while restricting major decisions to human operators.
Quote of the Week
“We must act now—not to stifle technological progress, but to establish clear rules of the road that keep humans in charge and keep AI’s use in warfare smart and safe.”
– U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand
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Musk’s AI Chatbot Helped U.S. Forces Fire Missiles
This week, as an initial deal aiming to end the U.S. war with Iran comes to fruition, it was revealed that thousands of missiles launched by the U.S. were fired by Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot.
The revelation emerged as part of a sworn statement pushing to protect the military’s use of Musk’s AI systems that could be impacted by a lawsuit, which alleges his xAI data centers are contributing to illegal pollution in black communities.
The statement, made by Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, states that Musk’s AI chatbot helped to facilitate the deployment of “over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury,” which Stanley called “a testament to the greatly increased operational efficiency made possible by the Grok Gov Model.”
A “Frontier” AI Chatbot
In Stanley’s sworn statement this week, the Pentagon official tasked with overseeing the Department of War’s use of AI wrote that xAI’s Grok is one of just four proprietary AI models “capable of supporting national security applications.”
Stanley wrote that xAI also “remains one of just three enterprise providers equipped to sustain mission-critical operations across Secret and Top-Secret classified networks for the foreseeable future due to the enormous resources required for initial certification.”
“DoW currently relies on derivatives of xAl’s commercial offerings known as the Grok Gov Model,” according to Stanley, who goes on to note in his statement that the AI chatbot has been deployed in systems that include Maven Smart Systems, where it assists in supporting “vital national security missions, including targeting, intelligence, readiness, and recruitment,” and also aids in a range of other military tasks.
“The Grok Gov Model offers features unique to xAI that are found in no other frontier Al model,” Stanley wrote. As an illustration of its capability, Stanley then made the chilling revelation of just how involved in military activities the xAI chatbot has recently become.
Grok Goes to War
“To further illustrate the uses of the Grok Gov Model within DoW, MSS frontier workflows enabled U.S. forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury, a testament to the greatly increased operational efficiency made possible by the Grok Gov Model,” Stanley wrote in his testimony.
As reported by The Independent, the sworn statement provided by Stanley appears to represent the first confirmation by an official within the Trump Administration that Elon Musk’s AI is being used to control U.S. weapons used against Iran.
Since the conflict began in February, the Trump administration has faced scrutiny over U.S.-led attacks that have resulted in civilian deaths, with mounting questions over the military’s use of AI during the conflict.
In an analysis by the Lieber Institute at West Point, Jessica Dorsey and Luke Moffett noted that AI systems “are frequently framed as ushering in an era of unprecedented precision and efficiency in warfare,” but in reality, issues that include recent figures involving as many as 1,700 civilian deaths as of May 2026 “calls that narrative into serious question.”
“CENTCOM claimed it was generating 1,000 targets per hour,” Moffett and Dorsey wrote, adding that while “such capabilities are often framed as enhancing precision… they also introduce new layers of abstraction between decision-makers and the consequences of their actions.”
Pending Court Rulings Could Impact the Pentagon’s AI Use
The U.S. Department of Justice has argued that a pending court ruling could significantly impact the Pentagon’s use of AI if it is prevented from deploying xAI across its systems.
In an effort to prevent such setbacks, the Trump administration has requested that a lawsuit launched by the NAACP be dismissed by a Mississippi-based federal judge. The lawsuit claims that Musk’s xAI Colossus 2 data center, which relies on several dozen gas-powered turbines, is operating in violation of the Clean Air Act. Presently, the turbines are being operated without permits, the lawsuit asserts.
In his sworn statement this week, Stanley called Musk’s xAI systems a “long-term strategic tool vital to maintaining our technological advantage against adversaries.”
However, opponents of such measures in Washington argue that new regulations must help to ensure that crucial military decisions—especially those which impact human lives—must also be made by humans.
“The most critical decisions affecting our national security and the lives of our service members must always be made by human beings, not unaccountable machines,” wrote U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D, NY) in a statement earlier in June.
Gillibrand also recently introduced a bill that aims to restrict military decisions that could potentially impact human lives to human operators, and to implement a ban on AI in governing the use of nuclear weapons, as well as autonomous weapons capabilities and domestic surveillance.
In her statement this month, Gillibrand argued that the Pentagon “is moving toward deploying incredibly powerful AI technology without commonsense guardrails in place, which could have catastrophic consequences that make all of us less safe.”
“We must act now—not to stifle technological progress, but to establish clear rules of the road that keep humans in charge and keep AI’s use in warfare smart and safe,” Gillibrand added.
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.
A SpaceX confirmou a aquisição da Anysphere, criadora do popular editor de código com IA Cursor, num negócio realizado totalmente em ações. É a concretização de uma opção firmada em abril e que chega quando as ações da empresa dispararam mais de 48% desde o preço de entrada em bolsa.
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.
SpaceX will acquire AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion in an all-stock transaction, the companies announced today. The deal is expected to close in the third quarter.
It comes just two days after SpaceX's unprecedented IPO and a few months after the merger of SpaceX and xAI, which brought a significant restructuring of xAI.
Cursor was one of the first tools to fully bake features that leverage large language models into an IDE. It's a branch of Visual Studio Code with heavy AI integration. However, incumbent platforms and bigger AI companies have since rolled out comparable features.
Days after its massive IPO, SpaceX says it is spending $60 billion to buy Cursor - a bet designed to help Elon Musk's sprawling rocket / AI / social media behemoth win over lucrative enterprise customers and close the gap with AI rivals like Anthropic and OpenAI.
The takeover was not entirely unexpected: SpaceX announced a peculiar arrangement in April in which it agreed to either acquire the programming platform for $60 billion or pay a $10 billion breakup fee. The company had been holding off completing the deal while going public.
In an SEC filing, SpaceX said it expects the deal to close during the third quarter of 2026.
Elon Musk's net worth has passed the trillion-dollar mark after SpaceX's IPO. His net worth, which was hovering around $800 billion before the IPO, includes the value of his 4.8 billion shares in SpaceX, along with his wealth from his other companies, like Tesla. Shares of SPCX opened at $150 and have remained well above the $138 benchmark that gives Musk a 13-figure net worth.
SpaceX combined Musk's rocket, AI, and social media platforms earlier this year, and said in its S-1 that its goal is to "build the systems and technologies necessary to make life multiplanetary, to understand the true nature of the universe, and to extend the light …
SpaceX’s IPO on Friday allows the public to buy shares of the combined rocket, AI, and social media company for the first time, and raised enough money to make Elon Musk the first trillionaire.
He has more wealth, on paper at least, than the economies of nations like Ireland, Sweden, or his home country of South Africa (CNN cites the International Monetary Fund saying only 20 countries have economies larger than $1.1 trillion), now linked to the promise of a business based on launching AI datacenters into space.
A empresa espacial de Elon Musk fixou o preço a 135 dólares por ação, numa avaliação de 1,77 biliões de dólares que "pulveriza" todos os recordes anteriores. As ações da SPCX estreiam-se hoje às 14:30 (hora de Portugal continental) no Nasdaq.
A former xAI engineer is suing the company and SpaceX, alleging he was fired for raising AI safety concerns about Grok days before SpaceX's historic IPO.
Numa semana histórica para o setor da inteligência artificial, a OpenAI submeteu o seu prospeto confidencial à SEC dias depois da Anthropic ter feito o mesmo. A SpaceX prepara-se para começar a negociar na bolsa ainda esta semana. E a Perplexity, imperturbável, mantém o seu plano para 2028.
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