The Pentagon’s genetic artificial intelligence platform, GenAI.mil, now has 1.5 million daily users at the Department of Defense, according to the department’s chief technology officer. That number represents nearly half of the DoD’s workforce of 3.5 million. Six months ago, the platform had fewer than 100,000 users.
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Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, revealed the numbers at a Hudson Institute event last week. When GenAI.mil launched in December 2025, only 80,000 people were using it. Michael attributed the low initial adoption to confusion about where to find the tool, what it could be used for, and what the rules were.
“It wasn’t really clear where to find it, what you could use it for, the rules were unclear, so we just got through that,” Michael said.
The turning point came with the deployment of Google Gemini on the Pentagon’s unclassified networks. After Gemini was enabled, daily usage skyrocketed. The Pentagon has since added OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok to the platform, giving all 3.5 million DoD employees access to multiple commercial AI models through a single portal.
The tasks that staff use AI for are mostly administrative. Michael described workers writing job descriptions, summarizing meeting notes, and compiling budgets. The most significant use case for GenAI.mil, he said, involves reporting to Congress: a task that previously required 200 staff hours can now be completed in five hours by loading the original documents into the AI and letting it compile the report.
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The pace of adoption is notable for its speed rather than its novelty. The Pentagon describes the same productivity gains that businesses have reported since large language models became widely available. Michael acknowledged this. “It’s just a matter of trying to get to, in this case, what’s essential in the commercial world,” he said.
The platform has moved beyond simple chatbot interactions. In April, the Pentagon revealed that DoD personnel had created more than 100,000 semi-autonomous AI agents using Agent Designer in less than five weeks. These agents operate at Impact Level 5, the highest classification for unclassified sensitive data, and handle tasks such as writing after-action reports, analyzing operational data, and reviewing imagery.
The scale of spending matches the scale of adoption. The defense budget for fiscal year 2027 calls for $54.6 billion for the Autonomous Warfare Defense Group, a dramatic increase from the previous year’s allocation for AI and autonomy of $13.4 billion. The Pentagon’s broader position is that AI must be integrated into every function, from clerical work to battlefield decision-making.
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That ambition has created friction. More than 580 Google employees, including senior researchers at DeepMind, signed a letter in April calling on CEO Sundar Pichai to deny classified military AI work for the Pentagon, arguing that in offline networks, Google cannot monitor how its AI is being used. The letter came after Google had already deployed Gemini to the Pentagon’s unclassified workforce and was negotiating classified access under the terms of “all lawful uses.”
