Google is providing Gemini AI agents to the Department of Defense (DoD) for more than 3 million employees, expanding the Pentagon’s reliance on commercial artificial intelligence for administrative and strategic tasks.
The deployment will initially operate on unclassified networks, with talks underway to expand them to classified systems, according to Emil Michael, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. Eight pre-built agents will automate tasks such as summarizing meeting notes, building budgets, and checking proposed actions against national defense strategy. DoD personnel can also create custom agents using natural language, Google Vice President Jim Kelly said in a blog post on Tuesday.
The Pentagon’s GenAI.mil portal has been used by 1.2 million employees since December. Personnel have run 40 million unique prompts and uploaded more than 4 million documents. This significant adoption highlights the growing importance of AI in the DoD’s operations.
However, training has lagged adoption, with only 26,000 people completing AI training since December. Future training sessions are fully booked, suggesting increased employee engagement and a growing recognition of the need for proper training to effectively utilize these AI tools.
The expansion follows a standoff with Anthropic, which refused to remove guardrails against domestic surveillance and autonomous weapons, leading the DoD to classify Anthropic as a “supply chain risk.” This development increases the strategic importance of the Google contract.
Roughly 900 Google and 100 OpenAI employees signed an open letter urging their employers to maintain similar guardrails. Google quietly altered its “AI Principles” regarding military and surveillance uses in early February, indicating a shift in its approach to military collaborations.
The DoD has also struck deals with OpenAI and xAI for restricted networks, further expanding its use of commercial AI solutions. Google faced internal backlash in 2018 over Project Maven, a program using AI to analyze drone video feeds, but has since loosened restrictions on military work.
