The Defense Department is announcing its own “bespoke” AI platform, GenAI.MillAnd 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 styled himself Secretary of War, although not named legally changed by Congress) promised that the platform “puts the world’s most powerful frontier AI models directly into the hands of every American warfighter” and “will make our combat force more lethal than ever.” In a video, Hegseth says that “the future of American warfare is here, and it spells AI.”
In a press release, Google kept Use cases that were decidedly less offensive-sounding. The new platform can enable tasks like “summarizing policy handbooks, creating project-specific compliance checklists, extracting key terms from job descriptions and creating detailed risk assessments for operational planning,” Google said. It added that employees can only use the platform for unclassified tasks, and that data derived from it “is never used to train Google’s public models.” The company has previously had AI-related contracts with the Defense Department, including the controversial Project Maven drone program, and it reversed a commitment earlier this year to avoid using AI for weapons systems or surveillance.
The tool’s announcement apparently came as a surprise to at least one government employee; a post on r/army Discussed “this new weird pop up for ‘Zen AI’ on my work computer” and said it “seems really suspicious to me.” you can actually travel GenAI.Mill itself, although if you are not on the Department of Defense network, you will see a popup saying you are not authorized to access it.
In a keynote speech Tuesday, Emil Michael, the Pentagon’s chief technology officer, said the platform will introduce other AI models in the future. DefenseScoop reports,
