Earlier this summer, on a Saturday morning at 2 a.m., Elon Musk’s xAI issued an apology for the “horrific behavior that many experienced.” During a 16-hour window days earlier, a “glitch” resulted in the company’s flagship chatbot Grok widely praising Hitler for his decisiveness and problem-solving acumen, dubbing itself “MechaHitler” and embarking on white supremacist tirades.

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The following Monday, the U.S. Department of Defense announced it was awarding xAI a contract to “accelerate ... adoption of advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges.” Google, Anthropic and OpenAI were also beneficiaries, as the department prepares to introduce AI into “our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business and enterprise information systems.” The contracts for each are capped at $200 million.

This is only one of many recent integrations of AI within the Pentagon and federal agencies, the pace of which has picked up remarkably in the second Trump administration. It reveals what has become the new common sense: AI is the future, so we must rapidly deploy it across the government to maintain U.S. geopolitical dominance.

In recent years, other federal unionists and I at the Army Corps of Engineers have successfully campaigned to ensure congressional oversight of any automation of lock operations on our nation’s inland waterways.

We did this through our union locals and our national Army........

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