In a sworn court statement defending Elon Musk's xAI from an environmental lawsuit in Mississippi, a senior Pentagon official said the military had used Musk's Grok artificial-intelligence system to help target strikes in the Iran war, calling Grok's operation “a matter of paramount national security,” The Independent reported on June 17, 2026. The Pentagon's chief digital and AI officer, Cameron Stanley, said the system was used to help fire “2,000 munitions at 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours.”
The disclosure came as scrutiny mounted over the war's civilian toll, including a U.S. strike on a school in Minab that was reported at the time to have killed at least 175 people, most of them children (the local prosecutor later put the final toll at 156). The same filing noted that the Pentagon had designated the AI company Anthropic a “supply-chain risk to national security” after Anthropic declined to guarantee that its Claude models would not be used for domestic surveillance or autonomous weapons.
Musk led DOGE in 2025 and his companies hold federal contracts, an arrangement that has repeatedly raised conflict-of-interest concerns. Here a Musk-owned AI product was used to help select wartime targets, a use disclosed not by the Pentagon voluntarily but in a court filing meant to shield his company from regulation (see Trump Denies Bombing an Iranian Elementary School Where More Than 150 People Were Killed, Calling Reports 'Fake News' Despite Satellite Evidence).
Correction (September 17, 2026): an earlier version of this entry described the Minab school as a girls' school. A UN fact-finding mission describes it as a primary school for girls and boys aged 6 to 13 and cites a final local toll of 156, including 120 schoolchildren.
Correction (October 1, 2026): this entry said Musk “holds a formal role in the administration.” Coverage of his September 30, 2026 appointment to Project Meridian describes it as his first return to government since he ran DOGE, so the sentence has been corrected (see Hegseth Puts Musk and Anduril's Palmer Luckey, Whose Companies Hold Billions in Pentagon Contracts, in Charge of a Study of Future Weapons Needs).
Related entries: Judge Rules Hegseth Illegally Blacklisted an AI Company to Punish It for Criticizing the Government.