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On Monday, the Trump administration admitted for the first time that it has used Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company to support U.S. military operations, including bombing Iran.

The information came to light when the Department of Justice (DOJ) intervened in a federal environmental lawsuit filed by the NAACP against Musk’s data center in Mississippi. The DOJ argued that the judge should dismiss the lawsuit because the data center is vital to issues of national security — and admitted that xAI’s Grok Gov Model, owned by Musk, has been used to conduct U.S. military operations in Iran.

In a court filing, the DOJ claimed that the NAACP’s attempt to stop Musk’s company from running natural gas turbines in Mississippi “threatens American national, economic, and energy security” as the AI company “supports the Department of War’s military operations.”

In a supplemental declaration, the Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and AI Officer stated that the Pentagon “currently relies on derivatives of xAI’s commercial offerings known as the Grok Gov Model,” and that it is “deployed in Maven Smart Systems (MSS)” to “support vital national security missions, including targeting” and “intelligence.” The Grok Gov Model, he says, “offers features unique to xAI that are found in no other frontier AI model.”

Maven Smart System (MSS) is a software platform run by Palantir and used by........

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