The Pentagon is now armed to the teeth with “frontier AI systems, based on the Grok family of models,” according to a press release issued Monday. Are you trembling now, ISIS? Does the word “Grok” send a chill down your spines, Tren De Aragua?
This expansion of what the release calls the U.S. “AI Arsenal” is apparently being slotted into the Pentagon’s more expansive AI platform called “GenAI.mil,” launched earlier this month with Google’s Gemini for Government built into it, according to an earlier press release. U.S. “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth apparently provided the following quote for that release, “AI tools present boundless opportunities to increase efficiency, and we are thrilled to witness AI’s future positive impact across the War Department.” Hegseth’s quote sounds uncannily like it was written by a 22-year-old graduate from the public relations program at Stanford.
While the Israeli armed forces appear to have used AI against Gaza in chillingly lethal ways, GenAI.mil sounds much more Dilbert-ish. If you were worried the Pentagon’s Aeron chair jockeys were going to be stuck using Gemini for Government, I have great news: they’ll also have—when the software is implemented in “early 2026″—exciting new AI products from an Elon Musk-owned company, which will enable “the secure handling of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) in daily workflows,” along with “access to real‑time global insights from the X platform, providing War Department personnel with a decisive information advantage.”
An April executive order from Trump sought to revolutionize efficiency in the Pentagon by ordering reviews with goals like, “Eliminate or revise any unnecessary supplemental regulations or any other internal guidance”—the usual Republican idea that you can improve everything by cutting red tape. Anyway, now the military’s “bespoke AI platform” will include a second set of models to apply to everyone’s AI-intensive tasks, so things are getting very efficient over there.
But while the Trump Administration has been unusually friendly to the whims of AI’s cheerleaders, there’s bipartisan precedent for this kind of thing. For instance, Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt’s involvement in a Biden era effort to “significantly increase” AI-related spending on defense and security programs in the federal government was called out by Senator Elizabeth Warren as a potential conflict of interest. And xAI and Google are far from the only tech companies seeking to intertwine their interests with those of the defense industry.
But it’s currently hard to picture Grok being a crucial link in the “kill chain” or something. This feels more like the Defense Department issuing a press release about a new supplier of toner, with a bit of Dot-Com Bubble flavor thrown in. It’s like the Pentagon is announcing that every desk at the Pentagon, currently equipped only with CompuServe, will now get its very own AOL CD-ROM too. Very cool. Thanks for telling us, Secretary Hegseth.
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