DOD initiates large-scale rollout of commercial AI models and emerging agentic tools
The Pentagon is rolling out a purpose-built platform — GenAI.mil — to deliver commercial artificial intelligence options directly to its almost entire workforce, with Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government products the first to be housed and available in the new asset.
“For the first time ever, by the end of this week, 3 million employees, warfighters, and contractors are going to have AI on their desktop, every single one,” Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael announced on Tuesday. “Why that’s revolutionary is that, for the past five years, the department has had very little to show in the way of AI across those conventions. And today, we’re launching that for three primary use cases.”
During a keynote presentation at DefenseTalks hosted by DefenseScoop, Michael officially unveiled the new and anticipated GenAI.mil tool that’s bespoke for military and Defense Department users.
Michael, who wears dual-hats as CTO and the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, previewed the platform and the administration’s plan ahead for the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office on Monday. Those three categories of near-term, top-priority AI use cases for DOD are associated with organizational, intelligence and warfighting activities.
This launch comes at a time when the emerging field of generative AI and associated large language models — which broadly produce (convincing but not always accurate) software code, images, audio and other media following human prompts — present both promise and complex threats to U.S. national security and military operations.
“We’ll start with 3 million people who are going to start innovating, using, building, asking more about what they can use and then bringing those [AI models] to the higher classification levels, bringing them different capabilities. It is really a transformation in the department in a way that we haven’t seen from any technology in the last 10 years,” Michael noted. “It’s a force multiplier. As we’ve seen in our consumer lives, AI can change the way you do things.”
The release of this new genAI platform also follows and builds upon recent directives from President Donald Trump for America’s government and industrial base to achieve global dominance in AI, to ensure future security and economic development.
According to press releases the DOD and Google posted on Tuesday, all of the tools that will be available on GenAI.mil are certified for Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) and Impact Level 5 (IL5) — meaning they’re secure and approved for operational use by the department.
Google’s assets are designed to supply personnel with “an edge through natural language conversation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and is web-grounded against Google Search to ensure outputs are reliable and dramatically reduces the risk of AI hallucinations.”
Details about implementation have been sparse, but the Pentagon’s CDAO currently has contracts with four frontier AI companies: Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI and Google. Notably, Michael confirmed other industry-made AI models and capabilities beyond Google’s Gemini products will be accessible on the enterprise GenAI platform down the line.
“We are pushing all of our chips in on artificial intelligence as a fighting force. The department is tapping into America’s commercial genius, and we’re embedding generative AI into our daily battle rhythm,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in DOD’s press release.
