Pentagon brings on Grok and ChatGPT for military use

The Pentagon announced on Monday that it brought on Starshield AI’s Grok for Government and OpenAI’s ChatGPT for unclassified military use, expanding the number of AI assistants on the department’s platform.

According to the Pentagon, Grok for Government will provide the department with “immediate productivity gains, stronger knowledge continuity and more secure and efficient collaboration.”

The Department of Defense’s (DOD) personnel will gain access to “advanced capabilities, including deep-thinking inference, adaptive reasoning modes (Auto, Fast, and Expert), customizable workspaces, persistent projects and reusable ‘playbooks’ that capture and scale institutional knowledge,” the agency said in the announcement .

“Starshield AI’s Grok for Government enables the Joint Force to execute missions faster and with greater precision across numerous operational contexts, ranging from market research analysis for acquisition professionals to supply chain management for logisticians,” the department said.

The DOD said ChatGPT Mil will support “document-heavy unclassified work across the Department, including planning, policy, logistics, and administration, and is built for scale to support” more than 3 million of the Pentagon’s personnel.

The models will be offered through the Pentagon’s GenAI.mil platform , which was launched last December to provide commercial AI products to the millions of DOD employees. The platform was first launched with only Google’s Gemini for Government, and more than 1.7 million users are on the platform, the DOD said.

It comes months after Elon Musk’s xAI firm and OpenAI reached deals with the Pentagon to deploy their models for classified settings .

In the weeks before these deals, the Pentagon in February moved to ban products from the AI firm Anthropic after the tech company sought guarantees that its model Claude would not be used in fully autonomous weapons or for mass surveillance.

The department designated Anthropic as a national security supply chain risk. Last week, a federal judge struck down the designation, saying the department’s measures against the tech giant were “illegal and baseless.”

The Pentagon’s chief technology officer, Emil Michael, said last week at a Breitbart News event that the Pentagon will be done with completely removing Anthropic’s platforms by the end of September.

Despite controversy around Grok’s safety and reliability over its responses and image generation abilities, the DOD has repeatedly touted the model as a national security asset.

The Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, Cameron Stanley, wrote in a court filing earlier this year that Grok allowed U.S. forces to deploy more than 2,000 munitions to 2,000 targets within 96 hours in the Iran war.

Grok is also being used across civil agencies. Under a deal with the General Services Administration, agencies can purchase xAI’s Grok models for just 42 cents until March 2027.