Pentagon rolls out ChatGPT and Grok for staff

The US Department of Defense has rolled out specialised versions of ChatGPT and Grok to its GenAI.mil platform, extending artificial intelligence tools tailored to government and defence-related work to nearly three million military and civilian personnel--while notably leaving Anthropic's Claude conspicuously absent from the lineup.

The newly deployed tools, ChatGPT Mil and Grok for Government, have been integrated into GenAI.mil, the Pentagon's central platform for secure AI use, joining Google's Gemini for Government as the third model on offer. More than 1.7 million of the department's roughly three million personnel have already registered as unique users of the platform since its launch late last year. ChatGPT Mil is designed to support document-heavy unclassified work spanning planning, policy development, logistics and administration, whereas Grok for Government is slated for deployment across a broader swath of military applications, including supply-chain management and procurement-related market analysis.

The rollout throws into sharp relief the Pentagon's protracted rupture with Anthropic, whose Claude models were originally envisaged as part of the same platform but were subsequently frozen out after the company declined to relinquish contractual safeguards barring the use of its technology in fully autonomous weapons systems or mass domestic surveillance. In February, the department designated Anthropic a "supply-chain risk"--a classification historically reserved for firms with ties to foreign adversaries--prompting the company to mount a legal challenge. A federal judge has since ruled the designation unconstitutional and permanently barred its enforcement, though a parallel case contesting Anthropic's exclusion remains pending before the DC Circuit Court, and Claude has yet to be reinstated on GenAI.mil.

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Even as that dispute grinds on, the Pentagon has pressed ahead with a broader diversification of its AI supply chain, entering into additional agreements with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Nvidia and Reflection AI. Department officials have framed the strategy as a deliberate hedge against vendor lock-in, underscoring their determination to avoid dependence on any single AI provider as they seek to accelerate the adoption of advanced artificial intelligence across the defence establishment.