The Pentagon is now armed to the teeth with “borderline AI systems, based on the Grok family of models,” according to a statement released Monday. Are you trembling now, ISIS? Does the word “Grok” send you chills, Tren De Aragua?
This expansion of what the release calls the US “AI Arsenal” apparently includes the Pentagon’s more expansive AI platform called “GenAI.mil,” which was launched earlier this month with Google’s Government Gemini built into it, according to a previous report. US “Secretary of the Army” Pete Hegseth apparently provided the following quote for that release, “AI tools present limitless opportunities to increase efficiency, and we are excited to see the positive impact AI will have in the future throughout the Department of Defense.” Hegseth’s words sound vaguely like they were written by a 22-year-old graduate student in Stanford’s public relations program.
While the Israeli armed forces appear to have used AI against Gaza in lethal ways, GenAI.mil sounds more Dilbert-ish. If you were worried that the Pentagon’s Aeron chair jockeys would be stuck using Gemini in the Government, I have good news: they will have—when the software is implemented in “early 2026″—exciting new AI products from the company owned by Elon Musk, which will allow “secure management of safe controls and real work flows” around the world. ideas from X, which provides the employees of the Department of the Army with the benefit of information which is decisive.”
An April executive order from Trump sought to reform efficiency at the Pentagon by ordering a review with goals such as, “Remove or revise any additional unnecessary regulations or other internal guidance”—a common Republican view that you can improve everything by cutting red tape. Anyway, now the military’s “bespoke AI platform” will include a second set of models that will work on everyone’s AI jobs, so things are getting bigger. a lot working well there.
But while the Trump Administration has been unusually friendly to the whims of AI cheerleaders, there is bipartisan precedent for this sort of thing. For example, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s involvement in the Biden-era effort to “drastically increase” AI-related spending on federal defense and security programs has been called by Senator Elizabeth Warren a potential conflict of interest. And xAI and Google are far from tech companies seeking to align their interests with those of the defense industry.
But at the moment it’s hard to see Grok being an important link in a “chain of murders” or something. This sounds like the Department of Defense issued a press release about a new toner supplier, slightly Dot-Com Bubble flavored. It’s like the Pentagon announcing that every desk in the Pentagon, currently only equipped with CompuServe, will now get its own AOL CD-ROM. It’s very cool. Thanks for telling us, Secretary Hegseth.
