Pete Hegseth announced on Monday that the US military will begin integrating Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence tool, Grok, into Pentagon networks.

Speaking at the SpaceX headquarters in Texas on Monday evening, the US defense secretary said that the integration of Grok into military systems would go live later this month. “Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said.

Hegseth also unveiled a new “AI acceleration strategy” at the Department of Defense that he said will “unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus on investments, and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI and that it grows more dominant into the future”.

As part of Monday’s announcement, Hegseth also said that at his direction, the DOD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office “will exercise its full authority to enforce” the department’s “data decrees and make all appropriate data available across federated IT systems for AI exploitation, including mission systems across every service and component”.

“AI is only as good as the data that it receives, and we’re going to make sure that it’s there,” Hegseth said.