The Department of Defense (DOD) announced that it has partnered with Google to deploy Gemini for Government across its new GenAI.mil platform, placing one of Silicon Valley’s most controversial firms at the center of U.S. military artificial intelligence. Google and its parent company, Alphabet, Inc. have faced years of public scrutiny over censorship, surveillance cooperation, and national-security contracts. Now it becomes the first backbone model for the Pentagon’s generative AI infrastructure. The launch signals a decisive shift in how Trump’s defense leadership now wages war, manages data, and governs military decision-making at scale.
The Announcement
The DOD — called by the administration the Department of War — said in its Tuesday press release:
The War Department today announced the launch of Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government as the first of several frontier AI capabilities to be housed on GenAI.mil, the Department’s new bespoke AI platform.
Officials said GenAI.mil is built to cultivate an “AI-first workforce” and create a “more efficient and battle-ready enterprise.”
The department confirmed that additional AI models will follow. It said all civilians, contractors, and military personnel will receive access. The move implements the White House’s AI Action Plan announced earlier this year.
President Donald Trump issued the mandate in July, ordering the Department to achieve “an unprecedented level of AI technological superiority.” The Pentagon claims in its release that it has delivered:
In response to this directive, AI capabilities have now reached all desktops in the Pentagon and in American military installations around the world.
The DOD described Gemini for Government as enabling “intelligent agentic workflows,” large-scale experimentation, and “AI-driven culture change.” Officials framed the deployment as a shift that will “dominate the digital battlefield for years to come.”
The platform is run through the AI Rapid Capabilities Cell inside the Office of Research and Engineering. The department says the cell embodies its stated priorities of reviving “the warrior ethos,” rebuilding force capability, and restoring deterrence through technological dominance.
AI as a New Manifest Destiny
Emil Michael, Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering, cast the move in sweeping terms:
There is no prize for second place in the global race for AI dominance.… We are moving rapidly to deploy powerful AI capabilities like Gemini for Government directly to our workforce. AI is America’s next Manifest Destiny, and we’re ensuring that we dominate this new frontier.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth tied the platform directly to military operations:
We are pushing all of our chips in on artificial intelligence as a fighting force. The Department is tapping into America’s commercial genius, and we’re embedding generative AI into our daily battle rhythm.
He added:
AI tools present boundless opportunities to increase efficiency, and we are thrilled to witness AI’s future positive impact across the War Department.
The Pentagon says it will provide no-cost AI training to all department employees. The training is meant to build confidence and operational fluency. Officials stressed that all tools on GenAI.mil meet Controlled Unclassified Information standards and Impact Level 5 security requirements.
The department says Gemini allows secure natural-language conversation and retrieval-augmented generation. It is web-grounded through Google Search to reduce hallucinations. Officials framed this combination as delivering analytical and creative power directly to military planning environments.
Trump’s AI Action Plan
Trump’s “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” quoted in the release, was published on July 23. It represents a comprehensive strategy to secure U.S. leadership in AI. The plan rests on three pillars: accelerating innovation, building AI infrastructure, and leading in international diplomacy and security.
For the DOD, the plan places AI at the center of U.S. military strategy. It assigns the Pentagon a permanent leadership role in measuring, scaling, and operationalizing AI across every layer of national security.
The DOD, in coordination with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), should maintain continuous joint assessments of AI adoption by the United States, its competitors, and its adversaries. These reviews are designed to drive constant adaptation of U.S. military AI programs based on comparative net advantage.
“AI has the potential to transform both the warfighting and back office operations of the DOD,” the plan states. It warns that the United States “must aggressively adopt AI within its Armed Forces if it is to maintain its global military preeminence.”
The plan orders the Pentagon to identify the specific skills required to operate AI at scale and to implement new talent-development programs. It transforms senior military colleges into permanent hubs of AI research, instruction, and infrastructure management.
The document also calls for the creation of an AI and Autonomous Systems Virtual Proving Ground to test, evaluate, and deploy emerging systems. The DOD’s infamous research arm, DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), receives a mandate to lead a new technology development program, in collaboration with the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), “to advance AI interpretability, AI control systems, and adversarial robustness.”
The plan also orders the Pentagon to secure priority access to cloud computing and private infrastructure during national emergencies.
Big Tech and the Architecture of War
Google’s entry into GenAI.mil is part of a much broader restructuring of the U.S. defense ecosystem. Recent contract data confirm a rapid shift toward AI-enabled systems and commercial frontier models, marking a decisive break from legacy procurement patterns.
In July, the Pentagon’s new Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) awarded contracts with ceilings of up to $200 million each to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI. These agreements direct the companies to help the department “develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas.” Those include warfighting, intelligence integration, and enterprise operations. Defense officials said the DOD is leveraging “commercially available solutions” to accelerate adoption and tighten the link between battlefield tasks and AI-driven decision support.
Operational contracts confirm this shift. In August, the Army awarded a contract worth more than $48 million to Metron Inc. to research and develop AI and machine-learning tools for expeditionary maneuver and air or ground reconnaissance. The contract directs Metron to build mission-planning software that can generate tactical options under uncertain or rapidly shifting battlefield conditions.
At the tactical hardware level, Anduril now holds contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with the U.S. military, awarded throughout 2024 and 2025. The company provides autonomous drones, counter-drone defense systems, AI-driven surveillance towers, and networked battlefield sensing and command platforms for U.S. and allied forces.
Alongside these moves, cloud giants have become the custodians of military data. Amazon and Microsoft now host classified workloads and major intelligence platforms. SpaceX provides global satellite connectivity essential for battlefield coordination. Palantir supplies predictive intelligence and operational planning tools used across combatant commands.
And now, Google becomes the provider of the Pentagon’s generative decision-support layer, pushing the earliest stages of military judgment through proprietary black-box algorithms.
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