The Pentagon’s main portal for AI tools now offers ChatGPT alongside Google Gemini, officials are set to announce today.
A Defense Department official said the OpenAI product, dubbed ChatGPT Mil, would bring new strengths to GenAI.mil, where troops and defense civilians can use generative-AI tools to work on controlled, unclassified information, or CUI.
“Gemini, I like for search functionality or scraping certain sources. Chat for more, like, text-based work,” said the official, who requested anonymity to speak before the official announcement. “We want to have access to all these different models, so people, if they prefer one for a certain task, they can use it.”
Work began in February to create a version of ChatGPT that could be used for CUI. In June, an OpenAI official said they believed it would be deployed in “early July.”
A DOD press release slated for release today said ChatGPT Mil would bring “a familiar commercial experience into the Department’s secure environment, tailored to warfighter needs…ChatGPT Mil supports document-heavy unclassified work across the Department, including planning, policy, logistics, and administration, and is built for scale to support more than 3 million Department personnel. This deployment accelerates routine tasks and frees up time for more critical projects across the Joint Force.”
One OpenAI official, who requested anonymity to speak before the official announcement, offered ideas for how the military might use its special version of ChatGPT. Operators at Northern Command might use it to streamline planning, resource allocation, or disaster response with FEMA or other parts of the federal government. Or the Joint Staff’s logistics directorate might use it to simplify paperwork and documentation. The official also suggested that logisticians at combatant commands “would be a natural audience, with uses such as reconciling supply and maintenance updates, drafting transportation requirements.”
In background talks, OpenAI and Pentagon officials said they don’t want to use models on the GenAI.mil platform for combat. The Pentagon has argued that they should be able to use AI products as they like, a sticking point in disagreements between the department and AI model maker Anthropic. And OpenAI has said that ChatGPT’s need for connectivity and large amounts of computing power doesn’t make it a good fit for combat anyway. The department is continually testing and seeking a number of other tools for those types of operations and actions.
Customized for security
Like the GenAI.mil version of Gemini, the military version of ChatGPT has additional security functions built in.
“When you’re dealing with CUI within the department, it’s obvious this is stuff that cannot be on a commercial model. We have to build it in a separate sort of environment. So it’s engineered in a way to be separate from the commercial model,” said the defense official.
Prepping a frontier model for use on GenAI.mil is an “arduous” process, said one former defense official who was involved in such tests. It requires building out the “environment”—that is, finding the compute resources, keeping track of the users and their unique security conditions, compiling the data that the model will use, and anticipating the sorts of requests that users may have.
“Think of having to pass security guardrails for both DISA [Defense Information Systems Agency] and the NSA,” the former defense official said.
As DISA builds the environment, NSA looks for ways that attackers might invade it—or the model might escape it, the official said.
The Pentagon launched GenAI.mil on Dec. 9 with one tool: Google’s Gemini. Around the same time, Pentagon officials signed an agreement to bring Elon Musk’s xAI tool to the platform, but no formal deployment has since been announced.
Joe Larson, who leads OpenAI’s government sales, said, “ChatGPT on GenAI.mil will make unclassified work throughout the Department more efficient, freeing up time and resources so DoD personnel can focus on the mission. This integration is grounded in our national security principles, pairing access to powerful tools with clear safeguards, meaningful human judgment, and accountability for high-stakes decisions. We’re excited to see what the Department’s extraordinary workforce builds with it.”
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