Trump administration wants to stop air pollution charges against xAI | Technology News

The US Department of Justice says the NAACP’s lawsuit threatens ‘national security, economy, and power’.

The United States government has intervened on the side of Elon Musk’s xAI in the legal dispute about the creation of a $ 20bn data center in Mississippi, saying that efforts to block the project threaten national security.

In a court ruling this week, the Department of Justice requested the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing xAI of using a large gas plant, which was installed to serve its Southaven, Mississippi facility.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the largest African American civil rights group, filed the lawsuit in April under the Clean Energy Act of 1963, which allows citizens to seek penalties and fines against polluters.

The NAACP alleges that xAI installed the turbines without obtaining the necessary permits, exposing hundreds of thousands of residents in Mississippi and neighboring Tennessee to pollutants linked to “increased rates of asthma, respiratory disease, heart problems, and other cancers”.

The lawsuit alleges that a “significant proportion” of the residents are Black compared to the general population of the US.

In its statement, which was submitted to the US District Court on Monday, the Department of Justice accused the NAACP of threatening “national security, economy, and power by shutting down the intelligence infrastructure that supports the military operations of the Department of War”.

The petition also states that the US Constitution has the power to obtain civil penalties “absolutely and unreservedly” in the executive branch, including “discretion to decide whether such enforcement is unreasonable or inconsistent with the purposes of the government”.

Adam Gustafson, a senior attorney for the Department of Justice and the Environment Division, said the government “will not stand idly by while the private sector uses environmental laws to undermine our national security”.

xAI, which is part of Musk’s SpaceX, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Earthjustice, an advocacy group representing the NAACP in the case, criticized the intervention as a “massive power grab” by the administration of President Donald Trump.

“Trump’s Justice Department wants to protect Elon Musk’s data center company, xAI, from liability for illegal pollution — and is trying to take away power from affected communities, the courts, and Congress to do so.

Abre’ Conner, director of environmental and climate justice at the NAACP, said that polluters should not profit from “destroying the health of black people”.

“Laws like the Clean Air Act are basic insurance for people to hold polluters accountable for decisions that harm them,” Conner said in a statement.

“This is non-negotiable, and the NAACP will continue to stand up for democracy and against government oppression.”

Trump’s administration has developed close ties with Musk, the world’s richest man, using technology as a temporary mitigation king and using Grok’s xAI model in the Pentagon’s quest to become an “AI-enabled military”.

In testimony in support of Monday’s claims, Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s head of AI, said that Grok was used to launch 2,000 missiles at 2,000 targets within the first 96 hours of the US-Israel war in Iran.

If the Grok cannot be deployed and upgraded due to “limited power or limited storage capacity”, many weapons used by the Pentagon “will be seriously affected”, Stanley said in a statement issued under oath.