Pentagon confirms it used a government version of xAI Grok to support strikes on Iran
The Pentagon confirmed it used a government version of xAI's Grok to help plan strikes on Iran. Officials said Maven Smart System workflows directed more than 2,000 munitions at 2,000 targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury.
The US Department of Defense has publicly confirmed that a government version of Elon Musk's xAI model, known as Grok Gov, was used to support targeting and operational planning during this year's strikes on Iran. The Pentagon's chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, Cameron Stanley, said the model ran inside the Maven Smart System, an AI-assisted command and data analysis platform developed with Palantir $PLTR, and that the workflows directed more than 2,000 munitions at 2,000 targets within 96 hours during an operation referred to as Epic Fury. What makes the disclosure notable is who is now inside the kill chain. The Pentagon's expanded reliance on xAI follows the end of its work with rival Anthropic, which had declined to allow its models to be used for fully automated strikes or domestic surveillance. The result is a defense AI stack increasingly shaped by which vendors are willing to accept military targeting use cases and which draw a line. For anyone tracking how frontier AI is being absorbed into military operations, this is the clearest official acknowledgment to date that commercial large language models are now embedded in real-world targeting at scale.