Even a free infrastructure venture wasn’t sufficient to persuade Maryland officers to work with Elon Musk.
On Tuesday, Elon Musk’s tunnelling enterprise, the Boring Firm, began discussions with metropolis officers about constructing a free tunnel across the Baltimore Ravens’ soccer stadium. Whereas the free venture appeared like a coup for the Ravens, who had pitched it to the Boring Co., the concept was short-lived. Inside 9 hours of the announcement, Baltimore’s mayor and metropolis council had filed a lawsuit in opposition to xAI, an AI firm additionally owned by Musk, alleging that its chatbot “flooded” customers’ feeds with nonconsensual intimate imagery and youngster sexual abuse materials.
On Wednesday, the Ravens stated that, after conversations with “public partners,” they’d stroll away from the tunnel proposal. Mayor Scott, a Democrat, stated publicly that it was “not something that I would have approved.”
Collectively, the 2 strikes mark a notable shift in a state that courted Elon Musk’s enterprise with open arms solely a decade in the past and illustrates the challenges now going through Musk’s assortment of firms because the famously impulsive and truculent mulit-billionaire has turned himself right into a political lightning rod.
The Raven Loop tunnel was considered one of greater than 480 pitches Boring Firm obtained to construct a one-mile lengthy loop tunnel that’s 12 toes in diameter. No different particulars in regards to the Ravens’ particular pitch have been made out there. The M&T Financial institution Stadium, the place the Baltimore Ravens play, presently seats about 70,000 folks at capability and spans roughly 1.6 million sq. toes. Followers sometimes drive and park across the stadium, use the town gentle rail system—which has a Stadium cease, take the close by subway and stroll for about 20 minutes, or, particularly for larger video games, use added transit and shuttle methods.
Maryland and Baltimore have traditionally welcomed Musk’s firms by incentives and partnerships. Former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Republican, was one of many first politicians to publicly get behind a significant Boring Firm venture in 2017, when Boring Firm introduced it deliberate to construct a high-speed tunnel for autonomous autos between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. The Maryland Division of Transportation sponsored the venture, and Baltimore’s then-Mayor, a Democrat, had stated the venture would have “tremendous potential.”
That posture has shifted since Musk donated $300 million to President Trump’s marketing campaign and took a hands-on function in authorities by DOGE. Governor Wes Moore, a Democrat, was an early critic of Musk’s work at DOGE, characterizing the firing of hundreds of federal employees in 2025 as “arbitrary” and “draconian” throughout a working session in March 2025 and saying it was merciless. Boring Firm president Steve Davis, considered one of Musk’s longtime trusted fixers, helped Musk run the federal government division.
In January of this 12 months, Maryland’s Democratic Lawyer Common, Anthony G. Brown, a Democrat, signed a letter with 33 different attorneys common demanding that xAI take “additional action” to forestall Grok from producing nonconsensual intimate pictures and youngster sexual abuse materials.
The calls for adopted large stories in late December and early January that Grok, the title of xAI’s chatbot, had been producing photographs of ladies undressed or in bikinis, violent sexual content material, or specific pictures involving AI-generated people that appeared underage.
Within the Metropolis of Baltimore’s lawsuit, the Mayor and Metropolis Council accuse Grok of exposing residents to the danger that any {photograph} they uploaded—of themselves or of their youngsters—may very well be ingested by Grok and reworked into sexually degrading deepfakes with out their information or consent.
The lawsuit additionally alleges that xAI has been chargeable for “normalizing a form of image-based sexual abuse that is difficult to prevent, contain, or remedy once unleashed at scale.”
The political motion echoes partisan aggression in opposition to Musk in different states. In Nevada, it’s been completely Democrats calling for accountability after issues of safety and environmental episodes throughout development of Boring Firm tunnels.
xAI and Boring Firm didn’t reply to requests for remark.
Baltimore’s first tunnel venture
Baltimore was purported to be the primary showpiece of what Elon Musk’s tunneling startup, Boring Firm, may very well be able to.
Again in 2017, the preliminary designs of the Baltimore-Maryland Loop had been formidable—a 35.3-mile twin tunnel system that will allow self-driving autos to journey between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. at speeds of as much as 150 miles per hour, with stops alongside the way in which. Critics, together with engineers, stated it was unfeasible, and the venture quietly died when Boring Firm stopped the federal assessment course of. Boring Firm later turned its consideration to Las Vegas, the place it’s presently digging tunnels and working an Uber-like Tesla chauffeur service.
Earlier this 12 months, as a part of Boring Co’s efforts to broaden to extra areas, the corporate launched a “tunnel vision challenge” soliciting pitches for varied tunnel tasks—akin to utility, water, or pedestrian tunnels—across the U.S. and promising it will construct a tunnel to at least one winner totally free.
The method culminated with the announcement this week that the Boring Firm had chosen the “Ravens Loop” venture in Baltimore as considered one of three tasks it will pursue—just for the Ravens to out of the blue have a change of coronary heart relating to Musk’s munificence.
Boring Firm issued an “update” on its X account on Wednesday: “After initial meetings, this project unfortunately will not be moving forward as part of the competition,” the account wrote, earlier than opining whether or not it ought to reopen the choice course of to a different pitch.
