AI AND THE DOD
HEGSETH OFFERS DEAL TO THE PENTAGON
Anthropic has been in dispute with the Pentagon over guardrails for how the military could use its artificial intelligence tools. The AI giant objected to the lawful use clause in its contract over concerns its technology might be used for domestic mass surveillance or fully autonomous lethal weapons. In response, the Pentagon labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk last month, the first time an American company has been designated as such. The Pentagon and its contractors are barred from using Anthropic’s products, though they remain difficult to extricate from classified networks. Anthropic sued in response.
On Monday, US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he plans to integrate Elon Musk’s AI tool, Grok, into Pentagon networks later this month. During remarks at the SpaceX headquarters in Texas reported by The Guardian, Hegseth said the integration would place “the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department.”
The War Department has entered into agreements with eight of the world’s leading frontier artificial intelligence companies, SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle to deploy their advanced AI capabilities on the Department’s classified networks for lawful operational use. These agreements accelerate the transformation toward establishing the United States military as an AI-first fighting force and will strengthen our warfighters’ ability to maintain decision superiority across all domains of warfare.
Integrating secure frontier AI capabilities into the Department’s Impact Level 6 (IL6) and Impact Level 7 (IL7) network environments will streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding, and augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments. SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle will provide resources to deploy their capabilities on both IL6 and IL7 environments. This effort supports the Department’s AI Acceleration Strategy by enabling new capabilities across its three core tenets of warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise operations.
GenAI.mil, the War Department’s official AI platform, is already demonstrating the scale and impact of this acceleration. Over 1.3 million Department personnel have used the platform, generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of agents in only five months. Warfighters, civilians and contractors are putting these capabilities to practical use right now, cutting many tasks from months to days.
The Department will continue to build an architecture that prevents AI vendor lock and ensures long-term flexibility for the Joint Force. Access to a diverse suite of AI capabilities from across the resilient American technology stack will give warfighters the tools they need to act with confidence and safeguard the nation against any threat.
Together, the War Department and these strategic partners share the conviction that American leadership in AI is indispensable to national security. This leadership depends on a thriving domestic ecosystem of capable model developers that enable the full and effective use of their capabilities in support of Department missions. As mandated by President Trump and Secretary Hegseth, the Department will continue to envelop our warfighters with advanced AI to meet the unprecedented emerging threats of tomorrow and to strengthen our Arsenal of Freedom.
HOW WILL THE DOD USE AI?
Jan. 12, 2026 |
The Department of War today launches a transformative Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy that will extend our lead in military AI deployment and establish the United States as the world’s undisputed AI-enabled fighting force. Mandated by President Trump, this acceleration strategy will unleash experimentation, eliminate legacy bureaucratic blockers, and integrate the bleeding edge of frontier AI capabilities across every mission area to usher in an unprecedented era of American military AI dominance.
“We will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI,” said Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. “We will become an ‘AI-first’ warfighting force across all domains.”
The Department is taking a wartime approach to delivering capabilities, with an emphasis on three tenets: warfighting, intelligence and enterprise operations. This approach will strengthen battlefield decision-making, rapidly convert intelligence data and modernize daily workflows, all in direct support of more than three million DoW personnel.
The catalyst for this acceleration will be seven Pace-Setting Projects (PSPs), each with a single accountable leader and aggressive timelines. These PSPs will establish a new AI execution standard for the entire Department:
Warfighting
Swarm Forge: Competitive mechanism to iteratively discover, test, and scale novel ways of fighting with and against AI-enabled capabilities – combining America’s elite warfighting units with elite technology innovators.
Agent Network: Unleashing AI agent development and experimentation for AI-enabled battle management and decision support, from campaign planning to kill chain execution.
Ender’s Foundry: Accelerating AI-enabled simulation capabilities - and sim-dev and sim-ops feedback loops - to ensure we stay ahead of AI-enabled adversaries.
Intelligence
Open Arsenal: Accelerating the TechINT-to-capability development pipeline, turning intel into weapons in hours, not years.
Project Grant: Enabling transformation of deterrence from static postures and speculation to dynamic pressure with interpretable results.
Enterprise
GenAI.mil: Providing Department-wide access to frontier generative AI models, like Google’s Gemini and xAI’s Grok, for all DoW personnel at Impact Level (IL-5) and above classification levels.
Enterprise Agents: Building the playbook for rapid and secure AI agent development and deployment to transform enterprise workflows.
This AI Acceleration Strategy is driving a major expansion of AI compute infrastructure through targeted investments and will unlock access to the data that gives the War Department an asymmetric edge. The Department will bring in top American AI talent through initiatives like the Office of Personnel Management’s “Tech Force” initiative and will empower small, accountable teams to attack complex AI integration opportunities. The War Department will eradicate woke DEI from our AI capabilities and ensure our military has objective, mission‑first systems that will guarantee decision superiority and warfighting advantage in this AI era.
“Speed defines victory in the AI era, and the War Department will match the velocity of America’s AI industry,” said Emil Michael, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering. “We’re pulling in the best talent, the most cutting‑edge technology, and embedding the top frontier AI models into the workforce — all at a rapid wartime pace.”
Grounded in the core tenets of warfighting, intelligence and enterprise operations – and following President Trump’s direction – the War Department will accelerate America’s Military AI Dominance by becoming an AI-first warfighting force across all domains.
Read the official AI Acceleration Strategy here.