U.S. Gov Building A.I. Independence from Foreign A.I. Developers

 Google’s Deep Mind AI workers voted by 96% for to unionize in order to stop doing A.I. work for the U.S. Government. The Deep Mind work is based in the United Kingdom and is quite internationalized demonstrating the exposure to foreign leverage the government has in reliance on commercial A.I. for the Department of War.

The left tends to dominate Internet corporate employment and has in the past merged toward the traditionalist Stalinist role of censorship of free speech. For D.O.D. to use Claude or Google for its Dept of War (DOW) A.I. needs is an unacceptable exposure to foreign interference with political sovereignty of the nation. 

I asked Grok if Elon Musk can work to help D.O.D. develop a hybrid model A.I. that is U.S. based.

Gary– Could Elon splice in Grok to partner with and develop a propriatary U.S. government AI hybrid that could be more US based in order to avoid leverage by foreign interests like google’s deep mind union international workers https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366642677/Google-AI-workers-vote-to-unionise-over-IDF-and-US-military-tech

Grok– Yes, this is already happening to a significant degree — and it aligns closely with what you’re describing.

xAI/Grok has deep, expanding partnerships with the US government (especially DoD/Pentagon), including classified access, custom development, and efforts toward more sovereign/secure US-centric AI capabilities. This positions Grok as a counterweight to providers like Google, where employee unions (e.g., DeepMind in the UK) are actively pushing back against military/tech use for the US and allies.

Current xAI-Government Integration

• Major contracts: $200M ceiling DoD deal (part of broader frontier AI initiative with Google, OpenAI, Anthropic), GSA schedule for all federal agencies at extremely low cost ($0.42 per agency for 18 months), and integration into GenAI.mil (DoD’s AI platform).
• Classified access: Agreements allow Grok use in classified environments, with cleared engineers and custom versions for mission sets.
• Custom/hybrid development: xAI offers partnerships to build custom models, fine-tuned versions, and integrations on government data/networks. This is exactly the “splice in” and proprietary hybrid path.
• Early/pre-release access: xAI (along with Microsoft/Google) shares upcoming models with the US government for national security testing.

This is far more “US-based” than Google/DeepMind setups. xAI is American-founded, US-focused (with strong emphasis on American values/acceleration), and less exposed to international employee activism or foreign influence vectors.

Addressing Foreign Leverage and Union Risks (Like DeepMind)

Google DeepMind (UK-based) workers recently voted to unionize specifically to oppose AI use by the US military, IDF, and related tech — seeking to block or restrict it. This creates real leverage risks: activist employees, international teams, or corporate policies could constrain availability during crises.

Grok/xAI avoids much of this:

• Strong alignment with US national security priorities under current leadership.
• Focus on “maximum truth-seeking” and fewer restrictive guardrails compared to some peers.
• Elon Musk’s direct involvement and public stance reduce internal sabotage risks.

A proprietary hybrid could involve:

• Government fine-tuning Grok on classified US data.
• Air-gapped/on-prem deployments.
• Sovereign US compute/infrastructure.
• xAI engineers (cleared) collaborating directly.

This is already in motion per public announcements.

Feasibility and Path Forward

Highly feasible — and underway. The US government’s strategy emphasizes partnering with commercial leaders (like xAI) for speed/innovation rather than pure in-house builds. A deeper “hybrid” could scale this: base Grok models + heavy US gov customization + security wrappers. No major technical or policy barriers apparent; political will exists given existing deals.

Challenges remain (e.g., congressional scrutiny from figures like Sen. Warren on security/safety), but momentum favors expansion.

In short: Elon and xAI are already “splicing in” Grok this way. It directly mitigates the kinds of foreign/international leverage seen with Google DeepMind. This hybrid approach strengthens US AI sovereignty faster than starting from scratch.

Google Goes All-In for Nuclear Power

 Google's decision to sponsor construction of nuclear power plants is interesting for several reasons. One of course is the Three Mile Island/Chernobyl anti-environment concern; in times of war or just terrorism via drones and hypersonic vectors nuclear atomization and dispersion could be hazardous to the health of Californians and others downwind like Nevada. Google could obviously choose to locate nuclear plants across the border in Mexico and around the nation near its data centers creating more work for climatologists predicting fallout patterns and shadows for possible disasters.

The choice for Google to go nuclear to provide abundant power for AI like Gemini with the Silkwood factor forgotten in history exemplifies the human acceleration toward building up  semi-intelligence with the simultaneous externality of increased entropy.

 In less than one generation the country has gone from vacuum tubes and transistors with mainframe computers and no pcs or smartphones-instead rotary dial phones on party lines were the norm, to vast networks of sprawling AI data centers demanding power for everyone's AI assistant on their smartphone and devices, laptops etc. The attraction for more ease and convenience outweighs- easily, the social good sense to configure a real material environment where the biosphere is not itself made into an externality of 'progress' and reciprocally forced into decline. 

Some evolutionary biologists have speculated that the most successful life on other are prokaryotes because they have been around for billions of years and may outlast the ark of creative intelligence that appeared briefly in the brief time of the complex organism of homo sapiens before they destroyed themselves. It is good to know that at least the meek or rather the simple will inherit the Earth if humanity destroys itself for lack of good sense in quest of excess profit.

Google Goes Nuclear

This phenomenon of the accretion of technology without a corresponding increase in environmental conservatism brings me to consider the complex of compresent developments of war saturating the planet following the catalyzing effect of the Ukraine war field test and development laboratory.

The Russians have developed the marvelous Oreshnik hypersoninc, marved missile that is truck launched, flies to space and releases several multiple reentry warhead vehicles that travel down to Earth targets at mach 11 twisting and spiraling on their way to evade Patriot missiles. Concurrently the U.S. navy has hypersonic whaling guns that shoot missiles from the bow at distant military targets. On a single day Ukraine may send 500 drones to attack Moscow while Russia retaliates with Islander hypersonic missiles that are short range and low trajectory flying under radar. The world is being saturated by smart bombs that fly, crawl and swim under the ocean surface. I can hardly wait until the year 2040 to see how that works out.