The War Department has deployed artificial intelligence systems to about 1.7 million users throughout the department, according to officials who outlined the expansion during GenAI.mil Excite Day at the Pentagon.
Three AI platforms are now available to anyone with a military common access card: Google's Gemini, Starshield AI's Grok for Government, and OpenAI's ChatGPT Mil. Deya Banisakher, acting director for Frontier AI at the department's Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office, said the models have reached parity with commercial versions, with the department now releasing models on the same day as public releases.
The department credits AI with increasing productivity across multiple functions. Staff are able to "research, summarize and extract information from droves of data that they previously couldn't do," Banisakher said, and the tools are helping graphic designers, operations research specialists, acquisition professionals and finance workers. According to the department, AI is saving billions of man-hours.
A concrete example: Three Navy developers used GenAI.mil to modernize a coding project in 30 days that would have taken two to three years to complete manually and cost more than $10 million.
Jonathan Buchanan, the authorizing official for GenAI.mil platforms, said the three systems underwent a soft launch to ensure they could scale and be monitored for security and performance. "We're just scratching the surface with what is totally possible with these platforms," he said.
The department plans to expand access by putting AI tools on the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System, making them available at additional classification levels.