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DOJ backs xAI in NAACP turbine lawsuit as Grok draws scrutiny for Iran war disinformation

· by Pondero Newsdesk

The short version

The Justice Department signaled it may intervene on xAI's behalf in a Clean Air Act suit over 57 unpermitted gas turbines in Mississippi. Separately, researchers documented Grok spreading false content during the US-Israel-Iran war.

DOJ backs xAI in NAACP turbine lawsuit as Grok draws scrutiny for Iran war disinformation

The Justice Department told a federal court it may intervene in the NAACP's Clean Air Act lawsuit against Elon Musk's xAI, signaling the Trump administration would side with the AI company over environmental plaintiffs. The June 15 intervention deadline passed Monday. Separately, researchers published findings that xAI's Grok chatbot spread false and contradictory content to users seeking to verify claims about the 2026 US-Israel-Iran war.

What the DOJ said about the turbine lawsuit

The NAACP, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, sued xAI in April over a gas-fired power plant xAI operates in Southaven, Mississippi, to fuel its Colossus 2 data center in Memphis. The complaint alleged xAI was running unpermitted turbines in violation of the federal Clean Air Act. The number of turbines at the Southaven site climbed from 27 at the time of the initial lawsuit to at least 57 by June 10, per a new NAACP motion cited in court records reviewed by Earthjustice.

In late May, the DOJ filed a notice stating it was "evaluating potential intervention or amicus participation" in the case and asking the court for extra time. Adam Gustafson, principal deputy assistant attorney general for the Environment and Natural Resources Division, wrote in court filings that the case "concerns the interpretation and application of the Clean Air Act, as well as other legal and policy questions as to which the United States has a substantial interest, including its priorities with respect to promotion of artificial intelligence," per Utility Dive.

The DOJ cited President Donald Trump's January 2025 executive order directing the federal government to "sustain and enhance America's global AI dominance" as justification for its interest in the case. The court set June 15 as the deadline for the DOJ to decide and for xAI to respond to or move to dismiss the NAACP's preliminary injunction request.

Why this matters

A DOJ intervention on xAI's behalf would represent the federal government using its legal weight to block an environmental enforcement action against AI infrastructure. The move would set a precedent for how the Clean Air Act applies to data center power plants that self-generate electricity using mobile gas turbines, a model xAI explicitly cited as a competitive advantage in SpaceX's S-1 filed with the SEC in May 2026.

Residents near the Southaven site reported near-constant noise and raised concerns about air quality affecting homes, schools, and churches in the area. A separate class-action lawsuit filed June 8 by Southaven residents in federal court alleged the turbines created a public and private nuisance affecting property values.

The NAACP's request for a preliminary injunction, filed May 6, asked the court to halt turbine operations while the case proceeds.

Grok and Iran war disinformation

The second significant xAI story from June centers on Grok's conduct during the US-Israel-Iran conflict that began February 28, 2026. Researchers from Factnameh documented a pattern of failures across multiple examples in which Grok misidentified war footage, confused real video with AI-generated material, and gave contradictory answers to the same questions depending on the language in which they were asked, per Factnameh's March 2026 analysis.

In one documented case, Grok identified footage from a February 28 strike on a school in Minab, in southern Iran, as coming from a 2014 attack in Peshawar, Pakistan. In another, it described images of graves from the same Minab incident as depicting a scene in Jakarta, Indonesia. Atlantic Council researchers tabulated more than 300 Grok responses to a single AI-generated video of a "bombed airport" and found the answers contradicted each other, at times within minutes of one another.

Because X users on the platform often cited Grok's responses as confirmation of claims, the incorrect answers circulated further and fed into ongoing war narratives, the Factnameh researchers wrote. xAI has not publicly addressed the Factnameh findings.

What to watch next

The outcome of the DOJ's June 15 decision will shape the NAACP's next steps. If the DOJ formally intervened on xAI's behalf, the litigation timeline and the NAACP's ability to win a preliminary injunction both shift significantly. If the DOJ declined to intervene, xAI faces the injunction motion without federal backing.

On the data accuracy front, the documented Grok failures during the Iran conflict raise the question of whether xAI will adjust Grok's real-time fact-checking behavior before the next major news event draws users to the platform for verification.

Sources