{"id":26986,"date":"2026-05-04T18:15:26","date_gmt":"2026-05-04T18:15:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/26986\/"},"modified":"2026-05-04T18:15:26","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T18:15:26","slug":"understanding-the-pentagons-push-to-become-an-ai-first-fighting-force","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/26986\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding the Pentagon’s push to become an ‘AI-first fighting force’"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Pentagon<\/a>, under the Trump administration, is pursuing an expansive and widespread effort to become what it describes as an \u201cAI-first fighting force.\u201d<\/p>\n

The department has agreed to several contracts with various artificial intelligence<\/a> companies over the last year or so to integrate their advanced platforms across the military\u2019s classified and unclassified networks. On Friday, the department announced its newest slate of deals with SpaceX, OpenAI, Oracle, Google<\/a>, Nvidia, Reflection, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services to use their services in classified settings.<\/p>\n

In announcing the deals<\/a>, the department said it and these companies \u201cshare the conviction that American leadership in AI is indispensable to national security.\u201d The Pentagon also said the companies agreed to allow the department to use their technology for \u201clawful operational use.\u201d<\/p>\n

The man responsible for leading the department\u2019s artificial intelligence charge is Emil Michael, the former Uber executive who is now serving as undersecretary of war for research and engineering.<\/p>\n

In discussing the new agreements on Friday, Michael said in a CNBC interview<\/a>, \u201cWhat we\u2019ve learned since we started this effort at the Department of War is that it\u2019s irresponsible to be reliant on any one partner.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lauren Kahn, a former Pentagon official and now an analyst with Georgetown\u2019s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, told the Washington Examiner, \u201cIt\u2019s honestly a really good thing, and more than a good thing, it was an inevitability, it was a necessity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s long overdue that the Pentagon has access to these systems,\u201d Kahn added.<\/p>\n

While the AI push at the Pentagon did not begin under the Trump administration, the department released its new AI Acceleration Strategy in January, laying out three main tenets: warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise operations. Under the warfighting tenet, the goal is to pursue ways to discover, test, and scale new ways of fighting with and against AI-enabled capabilities; trying to work through AI-enabled battle management and decision support; and accelerating AI-aided military simulation development.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus our investments and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI,\u201d Secretary of War Pete Hegseth<\/a> said at the time. \u201cWe will become an \u2018AI-first\u2019 warfighting force across all domains.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"HegsethSecretary of War Pete Hegseth, left, and Undersecretary of War for Research and Engineering Emil Michael, right, arrive to look at a display of multidomain autonomous systems in the Pentagon courtyard, Wednesday, July 16, 2025, in Arlington, Virginia. (AP Photo\/Julia Demaree Nikhinson)<\/p>\n

Under the intelligence umbrella, the policy calls for accelerating the technical intelligence collected and analysis of threats and foreign military equipment to turn that intelligence into weapons much faster. The last section, enterprise operations, includes department-wide access to frontier generative AI models, like Google\u2019s Gemini and xAI\u2019s Grok.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe absolutely have to stay ahead,\u201d Hegseth said in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday. \u201cThe advantage that AI provides applied to any number of capabilities, whether it\u2019s domain awareness, targeting cycles, you name it, AI, and leveraging it, that\u2019s why we\u2019ve made it the forefront. It\u2019s AI-first with everything we do, integrating it at every potential echelon to ensure we can respond faster. If we\u2019re better at that than any adversary is, it\u2019s going to give us an advantage, and we have to maintain that.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Pentagon official told the Washington Examiner, \u201cI would say at a very broad level, everything is going to have a spring of AI on it. That goes with any piece of technology \u2014 it\u2019s safe to assume that going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cAI, obviously, is something that Emil\u2019s heavily focused on, but it\u2019s not limited to just that,\u201d the official continued. \u201cIt all has a very broad swath across all the different areas of technology development in the department.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under questioning from Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-NV), Hegseth said, \u201cWe follow the law and humans make decisions,\u201d affirming that \u201cAI is not making lethal decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The United States is far from the only country trying to harness the power of AI for military purposes.<\/p>\n

Last week, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios published a memo<\/a> alleging that the government \u201chas information indicating that foreign entities, principally based in China, are engaged in deliberate, industrial-scale campaigns to distill U.S. frontier AI systems.\u201d<\/p>\n

Per the memo, the administration intends to share information with American AI companies about these attempted thefts, enable better coordination with them against such attacks, try to develop best practices to identify, mitigate, and remediate these activities, and explore ways to hold foreign actors accountable.<\/p>\n

Reporting from the New York Times<\/a> last month suggested that China\u2019s technological prowess at autonomous drones, recently on display in a military parade, \u201cset off alarm bells\u201d in the Pentagon, which determined it was lagging behind. While the U.S. and China are locked in an AI arms race, they are far from the only countries investing significant resources into being the best.<\/p>\n

Use of AI<\/p>\n

Pentagon employees could use AI for routine things, or it can be involved in kinetic operations.<\/p>\n

The department launched an official AI platform, GenAI.mil, along with Google Cloud\u2019s Gemini for Government in December. And to date, more than 1.3 million department personnel have used it, already generating tens of millions of prompts.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve seen numerous anecdotes from across the joint force of folks shaving what has taken months down to days, and thousands of manpower hours shaved down by simply putting Gen AI to good use,\u201d the Pentagon official added.<\/p>\n

In one example of how the department is using AI, per the official, the Army XVIII Airborne Corps was able to shorten the time it took to create the Writing Corps and Division-level Operations Orders for the Southcom area of responsibility to about six weeks using GenAI, while it usually takes between nine and 12 months.<\/p>\n

Another primary use of AI, like with Project Maven, is to take intelligence gathered from countless entities and synthesize it in a fraction of the time it would take a human to do.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re trying to synthesize data among all of our different providers and the intel agencies to obviously get a clearer picture of different streams of data, whether it\u2019s satellite imagery or whatever we have at our disposal to make better decisions, augment the warfighter, and make sure we always maintain a dominant advantage in any domain of warfare,\u201d the official continued.<\/p>\n

In 2017, the department\u00a0launched Project Maven, which said at the time<\/a>\u00a0that it needed \u201cto do much more and move much faster\u201d in order to \u201cintegrate artificial intelligence and machine learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

The military has paired the Maven Smart System, which was built by Palantir, combined it with Anthropic\u2019s Claude, and used them to sift through classified data gathered in real time from satellites, surveillance, and other intelligence, specifically during the war in Iran. The systems also suggested hundreds of targets and issued precise locations for them, speeding up the campaign, according to<\/a> the Washington Post.<\/p>\n

Anthropic<\/p>\n

While the Pentagon announced the deals with seven tech companies, Anthropic was not among them.<\/p>\n

The department listed Anthropic as a \u201csupply chain-risk\u201d in early March, a designation historically reserved for foreign companies, over disputes about guardrails for the military\u2019s use of its AI platform in warfare. Previously, Anthropic\u2019s Claude model was the only AI platform allowed on the Pentagon\u2019s classified network.<\/p>\n

Despite the designation, which Anthropic has sued the administration over, the company is still in talks with the White House about a new deal. The company\u2019s CEO, Dario Amodei, met with senior administration officials at the White House on April 17, and shortly after, President\u00a0Donald Trump<\/a>\u00a0said it\u2019s still \u201cpossible<\/a>\u201d they make a deal.<\/p>\n

Without mentioning Amodei by name, however, Hegseth called him \u201can ideological lunatic who shouldn\u2019t have sole decision-making over what we do,\u201d during his Senate testimony on Thursday.<\/p>\n

Anthropic recently unveiled its newest AI platform, Claude Mythos, which the company said is so powerful in identifying and exploiting hidden flaws in software that it does not plan to release it to the public. The company also announced an initiative with other tech companies to use Mythos as part of their defensive security work, while they also gave it to more than 40 additional organizations that build or maintain critical infrastructure, so they can ensure their own defenses.<\/p>\n

PENTAGON SIGNS DEAL WITH SIX TOP AI COMPANIES FOR CLASSIFIED WORK AFTER ANTHROPIC FALLOUT<\/a><\/p>\n

Michael, in a Friday morning interview on CNBC, sought to distinguish the department\u2019s dispute with Anthropic and ensure Mythos can safeguard America\u2019s infrastructure.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think the Mythos issue that\u2019s being dealt with governmentwide, not just at [the] Department of War, is a separate national security moment where we have to make sure that our networks are hardened up, because that model has capabilities that are particular to finding cyber vulnerabilities and patching them,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Michael is one of several Trump-appointed Pentagon officials with a business or tech background. Collectively, they are trying to overhaul how the Pentagon operates with the private sector and defense industrial base far beyond artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26987,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,204,14347,208,1896,1599],"class_list":{"0":"post-26986","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ai","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-defense","11":"tag-department-of-defense-department-of-war","12":"tag-military","13":"tag-national-security","14":"tag-pete-hegseth"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26986"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26986\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26987"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}