Alphabet's Google is rolling out its Gemini AI agents to the entire U.S. Department of Defense workforce, targeting approximately three million civilian and military personnel. The deployment, announced by Google Vice President Jim Kelly, begins on unclassified networks, where the majority of DoD users operate. According to Emil Michael, the under secretary of defense for research and engineering, discussions are already underway to extend the agents to classified and top-secret cloud environments.
The initiative allows Pentagon staff to build custom AI agents using plain language, with no coding required. Eight pre-built agents will be available from the start, designed to handle tasks such as summarizing meetings, building budgets, and checking proposed actions against the national defense strategy. Some agents are expected to have operational impacts, aiding in planning and resource estimation for military tasks even on unclassified networks.
The rollout is hosted on the existing GenAI.mil portal, which has been live since December. A Pentagon spokesperson revealed that 1.2 million Defense Department employees have already used the portal's AI chatbot, running 40 million unique prompts and uploading over four million documents. However, a significant gap exists between usage and training; only 26,000 staff have been formally trained on AI use so far, a lag the department aims to close as deployment scales.
The platform is already demonstrating efficiency gains. Kenneth Harvey, director of the Mission Training Complex at Fort Bragg, reported that a military exercise scenario for up to 50,000 simulated soldiers, which previously took a nine-person team six months to plan, was completed for US Southern Command in just six weeks using the AI portal.
This deployment marks a deepening of Google's relationship with the Pentagon, which has been historically rocky. In 2018, thousands of Google employees protested the company's involvement in Project Maven, a drone surveillance AI program, leading Google not to renew that contract. The company has since loosened restrictions on military work.
The news comes amid a broader Pentagon push into AI and a concurrent legal battle with another AI firm, Anthropic. The DoD recently labeled Anthropic a supply-chain risk after the company pushed back on certain uses of its technology. Over 30 employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, including Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean, filed a court brief supporting Anthropic's lawsuit against the government, arguing the designation was an improper use of power that could chill industry innovation.
