Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was criticized after he announced in a new video that the U.S. military is going to be integrating artificial intelligence to make soldiers "more lethal than ever before," a move that has been described as "one of the first mass deployments of a commercially-created generative AI tool across the entire Pentagon."
The Defense Department announced Tuesday that it will roll out Gemini for Government via its new GenAI.mil platform, allowing employees to access the tool directly from their work computers.
According to a department press release, the launch brings generative AI capabilities to “all desktops in the Pentagon and in American military installations around the world." And in a video message, Hegseth said Pentagon personnel will be able to use Gemini to “conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed.”
He said:
"The future of American warfare is here, and it's spelled A-I. As technologies advance, so do our adversaries. But here at the War Department we are not sitting idly by. Under the leadership of President Trump, America will lead the charge on this technological transformation by revolutionizing the way we win."
"And that's why today we're releasing GenAI.mil. This platform puts the world's most powerful AI models, starting with Google Gemini, in the hands of every American warrior. At the click of a button, AI models on GenAI can be utilized to conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed."
"Building on the great work of Under Secretary Emil Michael and his team, we will continue to aggressively fuel the world's best technology to make our fighting force more lethal than ever before. And all of it is American-made."
"The possibilities with AI are endless. Now let's get to work."
You can see his post and the video below.
One wonders, however, if Hegseth has even seen any movies about what happens when humans turn over defense capabilities and decision-making to machines.
It never ends well—just watch The Terminator (1984) and its sequels, for instance, a film with a warning about how AI stokes chaos, eventually rising up to usurp humans altogether.
Frightened movie fans are not about this.
Emil Michael, the department's chief technology officer, told reporters at the Defense Writers Group on Monday that he expects AI tools to streamline routine administrative work, assist in intelligence analysis, and support conflict modeling and simulation.
In the coming “days and weeks,” he said, the department will begin “pushing deployment of these capabilities directly to the 3 million users at the Pentagon at different classification levels.”
For context, the Pentagon has already been testing generative AI across multiple offices and military branches. And in July, Google announced a contract with a $200 million ceiling to provide the department with its frontier AI tools.
They’re not alone: xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Scale AI have all signed Pentagon contracts this year as well.
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