Talking to an AI chatbot can feel like confiding in a mirror, a private exchange equivalent to brainstorming in a Word document. Yet when it comes to the most popular AI chatbots, that mirror is really one-way glass — and you might be shocked to learn how many different people can watch from the other side.
Since the rise of easily accessible AI chatbots, untold millions of people have happily fed AI models their deepest, darkest secrets. According to a recent survey conducted by browser company DuckDuckGo and flagged by CNET, a full third of all AI users admit to having told their chatbots a secret they wouldn’t tell the “trusted people” in their lives.
There’s a grim irony there, because by telling an AI chatbot those closely guarded secrets, you may inadvertently be sharing intimate details with tech companies, police departments, lawyers, and even your boss. That’s according to new reporting by the Washington Post, which notes that there have been a dozen court cases where chatbot transcripts were cited in the public record over the last two years.
Even if your transcripts don’t end up in the hands of Johnny Law, they can easily be obtained by your boss, assuming you’re using a company-provided AI service. And of course, there’s no telling how long AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic might hold onto details of your conversations, as WaPo notes numerous scenarios in which they may be required to hold onto your chatlogs by law.
There’s also the grim possibility of leaks from the AI companies themselves. In July, it was revealed that a whole trove of chats with Anthropic’s chatbot Claude had been exposed to the open web — and not for the first time.
“Unless you are having a chat with a service that has a temporary chat or, basically, an incognito version… [and] you’re also having it within a browser that’s not tracking you, the answer is no,” Jen King, a privacy researcher at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence told WaPo. “You can’t be sure that it’ll be totally private.”
And though users are remarkably comfortable divulging those details to their favorite bot, fewer are aware of those myriad ways their chat logs might live on in perpetuity. According to the DuckDuckGo poll, 53 percent of regular users said they didn’t know that AI chatbots are training on data obtained through their conversation, while 75 percent didn’t realize that conversations with large language models (LLMs) can easily be subpoenaed by police.
So when in doubt about whether to tell ChatGPT about your intimate relationship troubles, keep in mind that the internet is forever; and that goes double for AI chatbots.
As if a million white collar workers suddenly cried out in terror at once, a great disturbance in the AI force forced down every major AI chatbot service — a brief moment of reprieve from our AI empire overlords.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and X’s Grok mysteriously went down Thursday morning, and we still don’t know what’s behind it.
OpenAI’s status page noted “elevated errors across ChatGPT and Codex.”
“We have applied the mitigation and are monitoring the recovery,” the company wrote.
While X’s Grok shows widespread outages, Anthropic’s Claude status page noted that the “only affected models right now are Opus 4.8 and Opus 5.”
“The rest of the models have recovered to baseline error rate,” Anthropic’s website reads.
Spiking and falling reported incidents on Downdetector suggest outages affecting OpenAI’s services have largely been resolved. Other services, including Google and the popular video game “Fortnite,” continue to experience issues.
Netizens were quick to joke about out the unusual outage affecting almost every major AI chatbot service, describing a momentary glimpse of lucidity for a society obsessed with a tech that’s deteriorating our cognitive abilities.
Millions of users worldwide were left staring at blank prompt boxes and error screens on September 3, 2026, as the world’s leading artificial intelligence models — OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and xAI’s Grok — suffered simultaneous global outages.
India Today
The widespread disruption began halting traffic around mid-morning EDT, with outage tracking site Downdetector showing sharp spikes in error reports across all three platforms within minutes of each other. Users attempting to send prompts were met with failed connection warnings, severe latency, or complete internal server error messages. Secondary services and developer APIs that rely on these foundational models, including popular coding agent tools like Cursor, also confirmed downtime as upstream infrastructure collapsed.
While occasional single-platform downtime is common in tech, a near-simultaneous failure across competing models developed by separate companies — OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI — is exceptionally rare. Early speculation points toward shared dependencies, such as regional cloud backbone providers, major domain name system (DNS) routing failures, or distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting core AI infrastructure networks.
Engineering teams at OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI acknowledged the disruptions via their respective status pages, confirming active investigations into platform instability and API timeouts.
The widespread dark-out instantly disrupted workflows across tech, media, and finance, where reliance on AI assistants for coding, research, and content generation has become deeply embedded. Social media platforms like X were quickly flooded with memes and posts from developers, students, and professionals suddenly forced to resume manual operations.
Updates are ongoing as network engineers work to isolate the root cause and restore normal service across affected clusters.
MacDailyNews Take: Oh, the inhumanity!
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A SpaceXAIliberou hoje, ainda em fase beta, um novo aplicativo de inteligência artificial (IA) agêntica para Mac e iPhone chamado Grok Bot.
Nascido como uma ferramenta interna, ele permite que usuários criem “colegas de trabalho de IA”, os quais contam com seus próprios computadores e são capazes realizar uma série de tarefas de ponta a ponta, além de acessar as ferramentas (apps, emails, etc.) que você já utiliza.
Introducing Grok Bot, now in early beta.
Bots are AI teammates that do real work for you. They sign in to your tools, use them just like you do, and come back with finished work. pic.twitter.com/uyfA97yo98
Apresentamos o Grok Bot, agora em versão beta antecipada.
Bots são colegas de IA que realizam tarefas reais para você. Eles acessam suas ferramentas, as utilizam como você e retornam com o trabalho concluído.
A ideia, segundo a SpaceXAI, é que o usuário converse com esses “colegas” como se eles fossem pessoas reais, seja por mensagem de texto ou por voz.
“Usuários com acesso antecipado dizem que o Grok Bot parece menos com dar instruções a um agente e mais com delegar tarefas a um colega de equipe altamente capacitado”, comentou a empresa.
Divulgação/SpaceXAI
Assim que a IA recebe uma tarefa, ela toma conta de tudo automaticamente, de modo que o usuário só precisa intervir caso uma ação requeira a sua autorização. Ela também pode se lembrar de conversas passadas, enviar mensagens para outros bots e ser adicionada a grupos.
Na SpaceXAI, é comum que várias equipes executem bots em paralelo, com uma delas gerenciando as demais. Um chefe de gabinete supervisiona tudo, com um especialista para cada área: gerenciamento de emails, despesas, recrutamento, correção de bugs ou operações. Em vez de gerenciar vários agentes, o Grok Bot oferece uma pequena equipe que pode trabalhar em paralelo, eliminando a necessidade de você ser o intermediário.
A SpaceXAI disse ainda que esses bots conseguem aprender com seus hábitos, o que significa que seu desempenho nas tarefas melhorará com o tempo. Isso também fará com que eles fiquem mais proativos com o passar dos dias, assumindo tarefas antes mesmo de você precisar falar com eles.
Por enquanto, o Grok Bot está disponível para Mac, iPhone, Windows e Linux, para assinantes do SuperGrok Heavy, Cursor Ultra e Cursor Teams Premium — mas a empresa do bilionário Elon Musk pretende lançar uma versão para Android em breve.
Amazon’s artificial intelligence ambitions will soon be partly fueled by a natural gas-burning power plant in Texas that “could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States,” The New York Times reported.
These gas-burning plants are increasingly lumped into data center projects. They produce harmful pollutants, which can accelerate climate change impacts and harm public health—contributing to conditions like asthma, heart disease, lung cancer, and strokes. Some communities are demanding more stringent environmental reviews, but the Trump administration favors fast-tracking that can include skipping the permitting process entirely.
SpaceX confirmed it will power Terafab, its $16.8 billion chip megafactory in Texas, with its own natural gas power plants and “very large battery arrays.” Tesla solar isn’t in the plan.
That’s despite Tesla being a partner on the project, and despite Tesla selling solar panels, Powerwalls, and grid-scale batteries built for exactly this kind of load.
We certainly wouldn’t blame you for having completely forgotten that last year, Elon Musk tried to reinvent Wikipedia because he thought it was too woke.
In October, his AI startup xAI launched Grokipedia, named after its AI chatbot. The encyclopedia stole human-written and edited pages from Wikipedia wholesale and ran them through a large language model, which also fielded user-submitted edits, to better reflect Musk’s contorted worldviews.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the desperate attempt to twist the largest online encyclopedia in human history into an extension of an almost-trillionaire’s bigoted mind appears to have ground to a screeching halt — and, damningly, barely anybody seems to have noticed.
According to a new investigation by Lawfare, Grokipedia appears to have entirely stopped updating itself sometime earlier this year. Reviewing suggested edits from humans has also ground to a halt.
“As far as we can tell, no entry has changed in more than three months,” Lawfare concluded of the site, which is now owned by SpaceX since it merged with Musk’s AI efforts.
Worse yet, the site’s edit log appears to have broken completely as well, making it impossible to track which user-suggested changes were “accepted” or “rejected” by the AI.
Since then, it has turned into a ghost town, a completely redundant and misinformation-filled copy of Wikipedia, which remains one of the last bastions of human-edited and verified sources of information on the internet.
Even when Lawfare submitted an “uncomplicated factual update” about SpaceX having launched its IPO in June — an irrefutable fact that any allegedly “open source, comprehensive collection of all knowledge” should probably include — the Grokipedia entry remained stagnant.
Even pages that are purportedly drawing millions of views aren’t updating. The most recent approved update Lawfare could locate — to the entry about OpenAI’s ChatGPT — dates back to April 24.
As of today, Lawfare found that that there are 13,002 suggestions that “sit unresolved, trapped ‘in review.'”
“Altogether, what we found was that the ‘live’ change feed is gone, past decisions were retroactively reverted without explanation, new decisions are not being issued, and article text appears frozen (and, in some cases, outdated),” the publication concluded. “We do not know whether xAI is preparing a major revision or has altogether abandoned active development of the project.”
It’s a precarious situation. Despite having been abandoned, Similarweb data suggests Grokipedia received over six million visits in June alone. Hundreds of thousands of sites are also still citing Musk’s encyclopedia, which could spread misinformation even further.
Futurism has reached out to SpaceX for an update on the project, but considering the reputation of Musk’s companies and their refusal to interact with the media, we’re not holding our breath for a response.
SpaceX shares dropped on Wednesday after Elon Musk’s plans for blockbuster spending to position his AI and rocket company as a data center developer spooked investors.
SpaceX surpassed analysts’ expectations in Tuesday’s debut earnings report, posting quarterly revenues of $7.8 billion, well above analysts’ estimates of $6.82 billion and up 92 percent from a year earlier. It posted a net loss of about $541 million, better than estimates of $2.12 billion.
But shares in SpaceX fell 10 percent in early trading after it reported capital expenditure of almost $16 billion on AI, double the previous quarter and well above Wall Street’s expectations. It said spending would persist at current levels for at least two more quarters.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has spent 2026 turning his X feed into a problem no investor relations team can fix. His posts have escalated from trolling into open white nationalism, and this week his AI company sued the state of Minnesota to block a law targeting nonconsensual sexual deepfakes.
The board of a public company would have fired the CEO for just a fraction of the stuff Musk is posting these days. However, Tesla is not a normal company. Shareholders have given full control to Musk and now, they have to live with it.
Is it possible to not like a movie in a normal way? Can it simply not be “your thing” without being transposed onto some intangible, ever-raging culture war?
It certainly isn’t if you’re an anti-woke crusader like SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. Like a lot of very online right wingers who are suddenly qualified classicists, he’s very upset about the new Odyssey adaptation directed by Christopher Nolan.
Nolan, according to Musk, “desecrated Homer and groveled on his knees just to meet the woke rules required to win an Oscar.” That’s because his movie dares to do stuff like cast Black women and a trans man in prominent roles, making the director what Musk termed an “anti-White racist.” In other words, it’s supposedly not “historically accurate” — never mind the fact that the epic poem contains gods wandering the Earth and a Cyclops.
Thankfully, there’s a wonderful piece of technology called AI out there that’s perfect for realizing the juvenile aesthetic predilections of stunted creatives who want to wallow in an imagined idea of what the past was like.
“Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” Musk declared Tuesday, referring to his own AI video generator.
Musk’s post quoted, and implicitly endorsed, a three minute dialogue scene that another user generated with Grok Imagine, featuring a virtual cast that looks more Western European than Mediterranean. No comment from Musk on if this was sufficiently “historically accurate,” of course, despite previously accusing Nolan of having “total contempt for the Greek people” with his casting.
Before this year ends, Grok Imagine will make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer https://t.co/bVHzUmY9WN
Someone should probably let Musk know that there’s already a fully AI-generated Odyssey adaptation coming out, but the creators behind that one seem to respect Nolan, so it probably won’t be anti-woke enough for his taste.
But maybe the perfect Odyssey film doesn’t have to be AI-generated, if it’s in the hands of the right director.
One Musk fanboy suggested that he should “give Mel Gibson $100 million” to create a “painstakingly historically accurate” adaptation. Musk replied, “I’m down.” (The last movie Gibson directed, “Flight Risk,” was ripped to shreds by both critics and audiences.)
Though for the past few months Musk has fought like a combatant in the Trojan War to drum up controversy over Nolan’s film, his efforts have failed spectacularly. It opened to $264 million globally and will probably make a billion dollars, if not more, by the end of its run. It’s gotten rave reviews from critics, and moviegoers seem to love it, too.
And is anyone surprised? Nolan is a beloved figure in Hollywood with legions of fans. Musk has his own army of devout followers, too, but the difference is that Musk is constantly miserable, alienating even some of his own followers with his extreme takes.
Nolan, whether you like his movies or not, is a showman that wants you to have a good time. Even Musk said Nolan was “awesome” a few years ago. Audiences will remember that they liked some of his other films and turn out for his new one. They probably won’t take notice Musk melting down about it online, even if each of his posts gets hundreds of thousands of likes on his platform he remolded to be his personal echo chamber.
Elon Musk’s xAI is suing a man for using its flagship chatbot, Grok, to create nonconsensual sexual deepfakes of women and children.
The Grok user, a 67-year-old in South Carolina named Terry Wayne Harwood, was arrested in March on multiple counts of sexual exploitation of a minor. According to the allegations, Harwood possessed and distributed child sexual abuse material, or CSAM. Filed earlier this week in Texas, xAI’s lawsuit accuses Harwood of using Grok to do just that, per Reuters. He apparently used two different Grok accounts, according to the lawsuit, and though xAI claims that Grok refused some of Harwood’s requests, he was able to tailor prompts to sidestep Grok’s safety guardrails and create the disturbing imagery.
The lawsuit follows a massive deepfake scandal that unfolded over the winter, as X users realized that Grok — which had been updated with a new photo and video-editing feature — could be used to quickly and easily alter images to artificially undress real people and depict them in sexual positions.
As Futurism reported, some of these images depicted real women in sexually violent and degrading scenarios. Some of the nonconsensual deepfakes depicted minors. The Center for Countering Digital Hate estimated that during an 11-day period, Grok “generated an estimated 3 million sexualized images, including 23,000 of children.”
Now, as it sues one of its users for the creation of illegal content, xAI is fighting multiple lawsuits over Grok-generated CSAM. In March, teenagers in Tennessee sued the company in a proposed class action, alleging that Grok had been used to create deepfakes of them and more than a dozen other minors. Just last week, the suit was amended to include allegations that a man used Grok to generate more than 7,000 sexual deepfakes of his stepdaughter. The amended complaint alleges that the man’s prompts largely went unflagged by Grok’s guardrails.
In another high-profile case, the former conservative influencer (and mother to one of Musk’s many children) Ashley St. Clair sued xAI after she was aggressively targeted by sexualized deepfakes, including one depicting her as a minor.
Law enforcement professionals and child online safety experts say that AI has led to an overwhelming and disorienting new flood of CSAM, as Bloomberg detailed in a devastating report earlier this year. It’s also created a host of new challenges for those attempting to find and arrest child predators, as AI has made it more difficult for investigators to determine whether a child depicted in abuse material is real or AI-generated.
In its latest lawsuit, xAI accuses Harwood of engaging in a “calculated scheme to weaponize Plaintiff’s tool for criminal ends, exposing real victims to profound and lasting harm, while exposing Plaintiff to significant legal risk and reputational damage.”
xAI — which is now owned by SpaceX and has since been renamed to SpaceXAI — also alleges that it “enforces its rules against violators through account suspensions, account terminations, and by reporting suspected child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children,” or NCMEC. It also claims that xAI “has suspended 52,222 accounts and made 73,604 reports to NCMEC in 2026, resulting in (at least) 244 arrests.”
But despite its best efforts, it’s clear that the startup still has a serious deepfake problem. If a user is engaging in deeply disturbing criminal activity using a company’s service, it’s reasonable for a company to hold them to account. But suing users doesn’t fix a chatbot’s failing guardrails, facilitating their crimes.
Facing mounting pressure to acknowledge that Grok can still be used to generate non-consensual sexualized images of adults and minors, xAI filed a lawsuit Tuesday, suing the first user that Elon Musk’s firm has accused of using its chatbot to create illegal content.
The complaint targets Terry Wayne Harwood, who was arrested earlier this year for possession and distribution of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), the South Carolina attorney’s office announced.
As xAI alleged, the company assisted in that arrest after discovering that Harwood had been using two xAI accounts for months to undress or “nudify” non-sexual images of multiple victims, including a young girl who appeared to be as young as 10.
Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, is in turmoil behind the scenes.
The company is constantly playing catch-up with rivals Anthropic, with Musk personally obsessed with having his chatbot Grok match Anthropic’s Claude, Bloomberg reports. And its merger with SpaceX, followed by the latter going public in a historic IPO, led to dozens of employees leaving the company, throwing daily operations into chaos.
To get the house in order, Musk promoted Michael Nicolls to lead xAI (which was recently renamed SpaceXAI). But his work was cut out for him. As part of Musk’s plan to rebuild the company, xAI was seeking to slash up to 30 percent of its workforce in March, and that led to employees being fired without anyone informing them, according to Bloomberg.
Its efforts to hire new talent were equally fraught. Promising candidates would get interviewed and not hear back, because the understaffed human resources department couldn’t finish the necessary paperwork, according to the reporting.
Another challenge was Musk’s obsession with Claude. Reportedly, every time the Anthropic chatbot got an update, Musk demanded that Grok should match it. Numerous projects referenced Claude and some Slack channels were even named after it. Keeping up with Claude had become the startup’s explicit mission.
“Our near-term goals are to match the performance of Claude,” Nicolls wrote in a memo to staffers after becoming xAI president, per Bloomberg.
Some began to doubt Musk’s leadership, believing that the centibillionaire, whose success was built on making cars and engineering rockets, was out of his depth. One of his most ambitious projects, Macrohard, aimed to create a powerful AI agent system capable of emulating an entire software company — something that experts are skeptical is even possible. Soon, some employees complained that creating large language models was much different from creating hardware, per Bloomberg, believing Musk didn’t understand AI.
Other controversies further sowed chaos and dampened morale. At the beginning of the year, Grok sparked outrage for being used to generate millions of conconsensual nudes of real people, including children, disturbing some employees, according to Bloomberg. xAI also told employees that it would pay them to feed their tax returns to train Grok, but never did.
xAI cofounders soon gave a clear vote of no confidence in the company’s direction. In February, some began leaving as Musk prepared to merge xAI with SpaceX ahead of its IPO, and soon after the merger was completed, all eleven of xAI’s cofounders had fled the company.
As the IPO date loomed ever closer, xAI company found itself in such a precarious position that it sold some of its glut of computing power to Anthropic — an ironic development given Musk’s desperate attempts to have xAI emulate its AI chatbot, Claude.
The largest AI companies, including Anthropic, have all struggled to find or build the computing capacity necessary to train and run their powerful systems. xAI is the rare exception, with its model using just 11 percent of its vast array of computing power in April, according to Bloomberg. It also agreed to sell computing power to Google and another AI startup called Reflection.
These agreements secured a multibillion dollar revenue stream, but directly benefited xAI’s biggest rivals — and in a way, waved a big white flag. xAI was practically admitting it wasn’t on the same level as the industry’s top dogs, and was contenting itself with selling hardware, and not building the best AI model.
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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Get all the latest stories from The Debrief, with more breaking stories at the end of this week’s newsletter.
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.
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