Rep. Lisa McClain had an astonishing response to questions about whether she engaged in insider trading by purchasing xAI stocks just days before it was announced that the Defense Department would be integrating the company’s AI chatbot Grok into its networks.
McClain appeared on NewsNation on Wednesday, where she was asked about the report, originally published by Sludge.
Host Connell McShane asked, “There are reports your husband bought stock in Elon Musk’s AI company which is not publicly traded, xAI, just days before a report surfaced that the Pentagon was expanding xAI’s role in military systems. Can you assure us this purchase wasn’t based on inside info?”
“100 percent,” McClain, who is Chair of the House Republican Conference, replied. “Because if it was, we wouldn’t have bought 100,000 shares. We would’ve bought a heck of a lot more.”
Sludge’s investigation found that Michigan Rep. McClain’s husband purchased between $100,000 and $250,000 in private stock from xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, on December 15.
A week later, the Department of Defense announced its intention to integrate Grok, Musk’s controversial chatbot which has made headlines for generating explicit images of children, into its systems, giving it access to unclassified military information and allowing it to generate insights in real-time for department personnel.
On Tuesday, the Pentagon announced it would be granting Grok access to its classified networks as part of an effort to accelerate the adoption of generative AI tools in the military.
As a member of Congress, both McClain and her immediate family members are forbidden from using non-public information obtained as a result of her position for personal financial gain.
Sludge notes that there is no evidence that McClain obtained information about the Defense Department’s plans for Grok before her husband bought the stock, something McClain herself mentioned during her NewsNation appearance.
“You know the Pentagon doesn’t release that information,” McClain told McShane. “I can 100 percent assure you that we didn’t have the insider information.”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement of the Pentagon’s intent to integrate Grok with its networks came after X users spent several weeks using the chatbot to generate images of women, including minors, in various states of undress without their consent. These incidents prompted the UK’s media regulator to open an investigation into X “as a matter of priority.”
The chatbot also branded President Donald Trump a pedophile and said that Charlie Kirk’s widow Erika was actually Vice President JD Vance in drag.
In a Tuesday appearance at SpaceX’s Texas headquarters, Hegseth announced that the integration would go live later this month.
“Very soon we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department,” Hegseth said.,
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