Pentagon adds ChatGPT and Grok to its GenAI military AI portal

The Pentagon has added ChatGPT and Grok for Government services alongside Google Gemini to its primary portal for artificial intelligence tools.

A Department of Defence official stated that the OpenAI product, designated ChatGPT Mil, will bring new capabilities to the GenAI.mil platform, where military service members and defence-sector civilian personnel can work on controlled unclassified information (CUI) using generative artificial intelligence tools.

A Pentagon official said:

“I prefer Gemini for search functionality or gathering data from specific sources. ChatGPT is more suited to text-based work. We want to provide access to all these different models so that if users prefer one model for a specific task, they can use it.”

Work on creating a version of ChatGPT that could be used for CUI began in February. In June, an OpenAI official said they believed this version would be made available “in early July”.

A Department of Defence press release scheduled for publication today stated that ChatGPT Mil would “bring a familiar commercial experience into the Department’s secure environment, tailored to the needs of warfighters”.

ChatGPT Mil supports document-heavy, unclassified tasks across the Department—including planning, policy, logistics, and administration—and has been scaled to support more than 3 million Department personnel.

An OpenAI official, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of the official announcement, offered insights into how the military could use this specialised version of ChatGPT.

Operators at Northern Command could use the system alongside FEMA or other arms of the federal government to facilitate planning, resource allocation, or disaster response.

In addition, the Joint Staff’s logistics directorate could use the system to simplify paperwork and documentation.

The official also noted that logisticians across combatant commands would be a “natural audience with use cases such as reconciling supply and maintenance updates, and drafting transportation requirements”.

In background discussions, OpenAI and Pentagon officials said they do not intend to use the models on the GenAI.mil platform for combat purposes.

The Pentagon maintains that it should be able to use artificial intelligence products as it sees fit, which is the focal point of disagreements between the Department and AI model developer Anthropic.

OpenAI, for its part, contends that ChatGPT’s connectivity requirements and large computing power needs make it unsuitable for combat.

The Department continuously tests and explores a range of other tools for such operations and actions.

Like the GenAI.mil version of Gemini, the military version of ChatGPT incorporates built-in additional security features.

The official said: “When dealing with CUI within the Department, it is clear that these cannot reside in a commercial model. We must develop this in a separate environment. It is therefore designed to be separate from the commercial model.”

The Pentagon launched GenAI.mil on 9 December with a single tool, Gemini. Around the same period, Pentagon officials signed an agreement to bring Elon Musk’s xAI tool to the platform, though no official deployment announcement had been made since.

On Monday, the Pentagon announced that Grok for Government, an artificial intelligence product from Musk’s Starshield AI company, is now available on GenAI.mil.