Defense Secretary announces Elon Musk's chatbot will be plugged into Pentagon networks this month.

The Secretary of Defense, who is the Secretary of War now, went down to South Texas to make an announcement on Monday afternoon. He stood at SpaceX. Behind him, a rocket. He announced that Grok, which is the chatbot product of Elon Musk’s AI company, will be integrated into the networks of the United States Department of Defense this month.

He did not announce this at the Pentagon. He announced it at the vendor.

Hon. Hon. Let’s stop right there. When the United States government wants to announce a procurement, it announces it from the buyer. From the federal building. With the federal seal. With a press release on letterhead that says the federal department’s name. That’s how you do it if you are a buyer. The Secretary of War announced this contract from the floor of the seller’s factory, in front of the seller’s product. That is not a buyer announcing a procurement. That is a seller running an event and the buyer showing up to read the script.

The product itself is a chatbot. The chatbot, in the past six months, has independently generated antisemitic content, sexually explicit deepfakes of named individuals without consent, and a handful of episodes its own engineers had to apologize for. The vendor is shipping fast and breaking things. The thing the buyer is asking it to not break is the United States military’s information environment.

You ever notice, you put a piece of software on the same network as the launch codes, and the software has a documented history of mood swings, the conversation tends to be about whether the software is secure, and the vendor’s bad-week footage tends to drop out of the room. We’re paying premium not to mention the bad week.

The other AI that’s already on Pentagon networks is the one from Google. Google has problems too. I am not the kind of person who thinks it’s a great idea to put any of these things on a classified network, but at least when Google has a bad week, the announcement of the contract was not made from a desk inside a Google building.

Grok will go live, the Secretary said, this month. This month is January. The same month the previous administration got blamed for the things this administration is now doing.

The press wrote it down. The networks ran it. The footage of the rocket behind the Secretary will be in B-roll forever.

That ought to concern you.