GenAI.mil attracts about half a million ‘power users’ as Pentagon pushes forward with frontier models

Of the 1.7 million personnel who use the Defense Department’s enterprise AI platform, approximately 500,000 are using it heavily, according to a senior Pentagon official.

The department first introduced its GenAI.mil platform for service members, DOD civilians and contractors in December to provide access to commercial tools that can assist with back-office functions and other tasks.

The tech has since been adopted by the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force and Space Force as their preferred enterprise AI system.

Last month, the Pentagon announced that Grok and ChatGPT had been added to the portal, which also features Gemini.

“When we came in in the second Trump administration, there were roughly 80,000 people in the department that were using generative AI. We had basically these homebrew, bespoke models that had been developed at AFRL and other places, and now … 1.7 million of our 3 million [personnel] have used GenAI.mil and the frontier models that we have on that,” James Mazol, deputy undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, said Tuesday at the DefenseTalks conference, hosted by DefenseScoop.

“And by the way, we’re going to proliferate frontier models, not just on our controlled unclassified network, but also SIPR, which is secret, and then JWICS for top secret, and into [Special Access Programs] as well,” he added. “So, we’ve seen this explosion. Of that 1.7 [million], I would say we’ve got about half a million power users, or people that seem to be using generative AI pretty much every day to do their jobs.”

Earlier this year, a senior DOD official said that the workforce had used GenAI.mil to create 100,000 agents to help them do their jobs.

At DefenseTalks on Tuesday, Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, said the department is now looking at how to change its approach to integrating agents and mapping agentic workflows.

“But there are some challenges, and there’s some challenges on the horizon,” he added, noting that tech companies and their leadership are widely embracing artificial intelligence capabilities.

“AI is getting put into everything. That scares me, mainly because of capacity. We don’t have the capacity. It’s not just us; it’s industry writ large. Capacity for compute is going to be difficult for us to overcome,” Stanley said. “We need to start being more deliberate about making sure that the models that we have are fit for purpose, that they are the right size and scope and shape for what we’re using them for, so we can reduce the inference side and the inference cost.”