The federal government intervened Monday in a Clean Air Act lawsuit in which people in Memphis, Tennessee, and Southaven, Mississippi, are suing Elon Musk’s xAI over the health risks posed by the company’s unpermitted gas turbines.

The Department of Justice didn’t intervene on behalf of the people breathing dirty air, though: instead, it submitted an unprecedented motion backing xAI.

The suit, filed by NAACP lawyers, contends that xAI should owe over $100,000 a day in civil penalties for violating the Clean Air Act. DOJ is pushing for the suit to be thrown out—not on the facts of the case, but because, the agency claims, Americans need Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot for our continued safety.

“I can’t live like this. I don’t really know what my options are other than to get out of there.”

xAI’s massive Colossus 2 data center, in the Memphis area, was built primarily to train Grok models—new iterations of the AI that might be best known for calling itself “MechaHitler.” And it has onsite dozens of unpermitted gas turbines to serve its massive energy needs. Colossus 2’s power plant constitutes one of the largest industrial sources of smog-forming nitrogen oxides in the nation, able to emit well over 5,000 tons per year. People living near........

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