Google Gemini First Out of the Gate for GenAI in the Military
By Rebecca Grant: Putting agentic AI into the hands of Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Marines, and Space Force Guardians is the next revolution for the military. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth made the leap Dec. 9, with the debut of GenAI.mil, the Department’s own website for generative AI.
Military and civilian personnel in the dot mil universe now have Google AI at their fingertips. First offered on the site is Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government. It can be used in a dedicated, secure cloud or employed at an unclassified level for tasks such as improving contracting. Next up is likely Grok, scheduled for integration in early 2026, according to a Dec. 24, 2025 deal announcement.
“For people in my office, when we first saw that pop-up, we wondered if our computers had been hacked and if this was a legitimate new software, or if this was maybe something nefarious by an adversary,” one senior Army official told Defense Scoop days after the rollout.
Turns out the forward thinkers among the troops were already on it.
“Agentic AI is a capability that could swiftly account for these changing battlespace conditions and help solve large-scale, complex problems independently,” wrote Army LTC Rich Farnell and Air Force Lt. Col. Kira Coffey, in the U.S. Army’s Field Artillery journal. “We offer here that Agentic AI is the new frontier, ‘AI enabler’, the DOD should accelerate the adoption of AI to achieve these aims,” they suggested.
Look for more from Anthropic’s Claude and GPT-5/6 from OpenAI. Last August, both companies offered their wares to the government at the discounted price of $1 through formal GSA listings.
In July, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, Dr. Doug Matty, awarded contracts to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI to broaden the Pentagon’s experience with frontier AI capabilities and strengthen alignment with national security needs. The task orders enable commercial leaders to help the Pentagon determine what it needs from AI. “The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” Matty said at the time.
And there’s already been an AI-led espionage attack. Claude was manipulated by a Chinese state-sponsored group and attempted breaches of over 30 global actors, succeeding in a few cases. Banks, global tech companies, chemical manufacturers, and government agencies were among the targets. “We believe this is the first documented case of a large-scale cyberattack executed without substantial human intervention,” Anthropic said as they investigated and countered the incident.