The Pentagon announced on Monday that it brought on Starshield AI’s Grok for Government and OpenAI’s ChatGPT for unclassified military use, expanding the number of AI assistants on the department’s platform. According to the Pentagon, Grok…
Page F7From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
Pentagon hires Grok and ChatGPT for military use as Trump orders communities to accept new data centers.
As it ran on the front
The Department of Defense has begun using Grok and ChatGPT for military applications. The White House, separately, is pressing local communities to accept new data centers. This office notes these are not separate line items. A large language model does not run on ambition. It runs on electricity, water, and land, and someone has to host the building where that happens.
Communities being asked to accept a data center are being asked to accept, specifically: a facility that draws megawatts a small city would use, a facility that draws water in the millions of gallons for cooling, and a facility that, per the reporting, is being sited under pressure rather than by request. That is the cost side of the ledger. The revenue side, so far, is a jobs estimate and a tax abatement, the two entries that appear in every one of these deals regardless of what the plant makes.…
…(cont) Meanwhile the Pentagon's new vendor relationship is with the same two chatbot products available to any subscriber for twenty dollars a month, now doing military use, unspecified as to scope. This office does not have the contract value. This office notes that when the dollar figure is missing from a defense procurement story, that is itself a data point, hon, and it usually means the number is not one anybody wants reconciled in public yet.
Put the two items on the same table. One column: a federal government asking towns to carry the infrastructure cost of an AI boom they did not request. Other column: the same federal government putting that boom's core product into military use before the public has seen a contract number. The gap between those columns is not a rounding error. It is the entire arrangement — the public carries the electric bill, the Pentagon carries the subscription, and the vendor carries both invoices to the bank.
No fraud is alleged here. This office is not alleging fraud. This office is simply running the receipts side by side, the way it runs every filing, and noting that the community gets the power bill and the war room gets the beta access, and asking, as it always does, whose column that arrangement was written in.
“They're handing military decision support to a chatbot that makes things up, and in the same breath ordering your town to host the data center that keeps it running — your water, your power bill, your electric grid, all going to feed a machine you don't get a vote on.”
“The Pentagon's use of commercial AI tools is limited to administrative and analytical support functions, not battlefield decision-making — did I say not battlefield, because the contract language is broader than that, it's — these are pilot programs, is the accurate characterization, and the data center placements are separately about economic development for host communities, that's the message.”
The receipts
President Trump posted on social media Monday that people who "want to be successful and rich" should be supporting data centers. CBS News' Weijia Jiang reports.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.