Pentagon boasts of using AI to write reports mandated by Congress (1.5mil users)
arstechnica.comThe reports will be just as useless as they were before
We might have some disrepancies leaked just because AI noticed it and nobody redacted it out of output coz nobody read it before sending
And Congressional staffers will be using AI to summarize the reports, no doubt.
Meaning the techbros are basically carrying taxpayer money out of the door in buckets.
Happened at US aid too. Cut vaccine and food budgets and gave them billions in AI money to shovel into Grok and ChatGPT.
It’s all a massive heist
The shocking part of the story is the scale.
1.5 Million Users just within the Pentagon?
"The Pentagon has made AI tools, starting with Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government, widely available to members of all six military branches through the department’s bespoke GenAI.mil platform since December 2025."
"The number of Department of Defense personnel using commercial AI tools such as Gemini through GenAI.mil has significantly increased from just 80,000 in December 2025 to 1.5 million in June 2026, the Pentagon CTO claimed during his remarks at the Hudson Institute."
"The Department of Defense is the country’s largest employer, with more than 2.1 million Military Service members and over 811 thousand civilian employees."
From https://comptroller.war.gov/Portals/45/Documents/afr/fy2024/...
Presumably the whole point of AI is that we can start reducing that number. I am sure there's a significant number of people just working on various administrative tasks processing data and documents.
That's exactly what I want from the Pentagon, less real humans involved and more automated systems that don't even have the concept of morality and the social responsibility to be a potential whistleblower
Worked fine in The Terminator. Searching the the nasdaq for "Cyberdyne Systems" to add to my portfolio.
Unless we're doing away with human accountability, the responsibility to accuracy (and whatever other statutory requirements) will remain the same, it will just be concentrated among significantly fewer federal employees.
Hell yeah let’s take the largest employer in the country and significantly eliminate jobs. Great for the economic jobs report and economy as a whole. I’m sure you’ll get a check in the mail with the savings.
They still won’t pass an audit, ever.
Imagine if we had a federal jobs program for building high speed rail all across the country. sigh
Instead we have a federal jobs program for infiltrating States without their consent and performing Kavanaugh stops (where the SCOTUS says the government can detain you for DAYS if you're not white and look "suspicious" to an inadequately trained ICE or other federal agent engaged in domestic terrorism).
Trump supporters are going to really appreciate when the "you're not white" part is dropped.
How do you think OpenAI is going to become profitable? GovGPT.
Everyone is starting to use AI. I use three AIs daily. Why would the US military be different?
Well, you are not the Pentagon.
I presume they might view their internal data being used to train a private company's training sets as a concern.
There are a solutions, like Amazon Bedrock, that allow model usage with strict data control.
I think, assume. With the Military, with the goal of killing people, that there is assumption of more human judgment being involved. Beyond even the issue of a man-in-the-loop for targeting systems. But even generally, that these are big decisions that shouldn't be farmed out completely.
For every job in the private sector, there's probably someone in the DoD doing the same thing. In 2005, the tooth-to-tail ratio (combat to non-combat roles) was 1:8.1.
I'm guessing the vast majority of the AI usage is for things any typical office worker would use it for.
There are 3 million people working in the US military.
Very few of them ever come close to killing anyone.
Mostly they're white collar workers doing regular desk jobs, where AI is just as useful as in other industries.
A military is usually a big supply chain operation with an attached small war fighting branch
How many of your tasks decide whether entire populations of human beings live or die?
Guess the don’t need that budget increase after all with so much additional efficiency, right?
That's exactly what they should be doing. Reports to congress made by automated, neutral AI will probably be more honest, effective, and have a clear means of improving them over time with better prompting in comparison to whatever random people assigned to it produce. We should do this across the government, and there would likely be a dramatic improvement in efficiency and quality.
The reports are only as neutral and honest as the prompts given to them.
If you want the reports to be honest, then the Congress would write the prompt. If the Pentagon writes the prompts, then it can keep re-asking the question until it finds a spin that it likes.
You mean like the KPMG's AI-written report praising AI that was withdrawn after hallucinated cases studies ?
AI Slop Targeting already caused significant civilian casualties in the Hormuz War.
A great way to undermine government would be to get them locked on Lines of Report (LoR) pushed to congress each month.
Oh, no, this would be an amazing policy. Almost certainly a better use of their time and resources than whatever horror they would concoct otherwise
ok, first, this isn't superhuman AI; this is slop production at scale. we could do these with markov chains decades ago.
The only difference now is the slop looks critically better, but there's no quality accounting.
In AI-2027, there are many stages before superhuman AI. Military dependence on AI was one of them. This dependence creates incentive to do anything to not slow down, including ignoring any safety concerns.
I read that prediction as being about using AI for mission-critical stuff, which this isn't really.
Not sure why the downvote.
Part of AI-2027, one of the early steps, was government dependance on AI for routine jobs. They become dependent on AI, and thus less willing to slow down or put on any guard rails. Because they can't live without it, they keep accelerating.
Likely because they said Project 2027 which is something different
Did not realize there was a follow on to Project 2025, called 2027.
evokes something different/doesn't exist
At minimum that link does not describe a project and does not use that Proper Noun
Similar to Paperwork Reduction Act, we may need Slop Reduction Act.
Which would mandate an AI summary be added to each document indicating the amount of AI used to generate it.
AI slop reports from lazy, incompetent leaders? I'm shocked!
Half of those leaders are Democrats. They're not all lazy and incompetent.
Is the implication that Democrats are less lazy and incompetent?
Republicans haven't been lazy at all in their efforts to run the USA in my opinion. Democrats seem to have failed to match their energy. They've also failed to be competent enough to match their game.
I'm not a fan of the Republican party and I never have been, but I'm not impressed by the Democrats either. From here in Canada it all looks like a chaotic mess, rife with corruption on both sides of the aisle.
I don't understand the distinction here.
I never said which was which.
Both parties hate you and your liberties and have happily sold out your and your kids future to eternal debt
if any (D) President did the same thing there would be 250 comments talking about how amazing this is. a true step into our future, etc. (R) man bad. everything (R) man does is bad. I know this cuz the Media and Experts tell me!
You are getting mad at something you made up yourself
obama talked tough about the border repeatedly. including during a state of the union.
obama deported tons of people.
obama did the 'kids in cages' thing.
do you recall any protest? mass media outrage about fascism and racism?
hillary, bernie, etc, all talked tough about immigration back in the day. no one cared.
I have no problem with this. If the AI has access to the funding and schedule data, it will probably give a more honest answer that the humans. And in reality, nobody in congress is going to take the time to read the report anyways. They will just vote the way they are told.
You're assuming the AI will not be given any instructions to produce the report with a certain data bias.
That only matters to the extent the report is read, though.
If so, that would be auditable (in theory; whether it would be audited in practice, probably not).
Audits have literally no impact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Accountability_Offi...
How many audits has the Pentagon failed in recent years?
It's true that Pentagon audits failed to account for hundreds of billions of dollars. https://econofact.org/factbrief/has-the-pentagon-failed-its-...
But I am sure future audits will succeed in tracking down all of the prompts used for AI-generated reports. /s
Me either, bullshit vs bullshit AI is exactly the same. It's not like this administration was going to produce anything of merit anyway, so why not just go as quickly as possible to the bullshit instead of this 2weeks song and dance.
This is wonderful. Many of these reports are makework paperwork. One even wonders if pushing for them is just taking a page from the CIA Sabotage Manual and applying it to us. Considering Congress members barely read the bills they’re voting on, it’s probably insignificant that this pointless paperwork is dispensed with.
When we finally end Environmental Impact Reports by generating them at scale with AI we will finally be able to escape this plateau of ossification.
I’m not particularly attached to bullshit being manufactured by human minds.
> Considering Congress members barely read the bills they’re voting on
That seems like a good opportunity for AI to be used as a summary.
And on other fun note, in many cases Congress does not even write the bill, their patrons do and have them pretend to represent it.
If these reports truly are so bad, the law should be changed to stop requiring them. But, lawmakers aren't choosing to do that. Maybe there's actually some good reasons for them to exist.