Google is powering a new US military AI platform

The Department of Defense is announcing its own “bespoke” AI platform, GenAI.mil, and Google Cloud’s Gemini will be the first AI tool available on it, according to a press release. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth (who has dubbed himself Secretary of War, though the name has not been legally changed by Congress) promised that the platform “puts the worlds [sic] most powerful frontier AI models directly into the hands of every American warrior” and will “make our fighting force more lethal than ever before.” In a video, Hegseth says that “the future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled A-I.” [Media: In a press release, Google laid out use cases that were decidedly less aggressive-sounding. The new platform, Google said, can enable tasks like “summarizing policy handbooks, generating project-specific compliance checklists, extracting key terms from statements of work, and creating detailed risk assessments for operational planning.” It said that employees can only use the platform for unclassified work, and that data from it “is never used to train Google’s public models.” The company has held AI-related contracts with the Department of Defense before, including on the controversial Project Maven drone program, and it reversed a commitment to avoid using AI for weapons systems or surveillance earlier this year. The announcement of the tool was apparently a surprise to at least one government employee; a post on r/army discussed “this new weird pop up for the ‘Gen AI’ on my work computer” and said it “looks really suspicious to me.” You can actually visit GenAI.mil yourself, though if you’re not on a Department of Defense network, you’ll see a pop-up saying that you’re not authorized to access it. At a keynote on Tuesday, Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael said that the platform will offer other AI models in the future, DefenseScoop reports.