FIL PHOTO: AI (Artificial Intelligence) letters are placed on computer motherboard in this illustration taken, June 23, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
(Reuters) -Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren urged the U.S. Department of Defense to ensure competitive AI contracting, according to a letter seen by Reuters on Wednesday, as tech billionaire Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok gains ground in the federal government.
Warren's letter comes on the heels of Reuters reporting last week that Musk’s DOGE team is expanding the use of Grok to analyze data, potentially violating conflict-of-interest laws and putting at risk sensitive information on millions of Americans.
“I seek to ensure that the DoD’s procurement decisions encourage competition and avoid consolidation that can lead to higher prices, concentration of risk, and the stifling of innovation,” Warren, a senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote in the letter to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on Wednesday.
Warren's office asked the Pentagon to respond to her by June 11, instead of her original date of June 9,on its AI acquisition practices, how it plans to avoid getting locked in with a particular contractor, and its safeguards for data collection.
“How does DoD plan to ensure government data is not used to illegally train commercially available AI algorithms?” Warren wrote.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The letter did not mention Grok, which was developed by xAI, or its competitors, which include OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
In a meeting first reported by Reuters, Hegseth met Musk and members of the xAI team at the Pentagon on May 21, officials said, the second known time the close ally of President Donald Trump has visited the department's headquarters.
The White House’s Office of Management and Budget released new guidance in April directing federal agencies to ensure that the government and “the public benefit from a competitive American AI marketplace.” The guidance, however, exempted national security and defense systems.
Warren of Massachusetts and Senator Eric Schmitt, a Republican senator for Missouri who also serves on the Armed Services Committee, recently reintroduced a bill that includes provisions that would also encourage AI competition in the Defense Department.
The Department of Defense, with a budget approaching $1 trillion per year, accounted for over half of the federal government’s contracting dollars in the fiscal year 2023, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
(Reporting by Marisa Taylor and Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Mark Porter)
