Pentagon
6 items across 2 editions · appeared in the last 2 editions in a row. First seen Fri 11 Sep, last seen Sat 12 Sep.
- Emil Michael, Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, said "I'd say about 90% has transitioned", with completion targeted for the end of the month. OpenAI's ChatGPT, xAI's Grok and Google's Gemini are being deployed across classified and unclassified systems in place of Anthropic's models.
- DefenseScoop reports the break followed Anthropic's attempt to secure contract terms preventing its models being used for mass surveillance of US citizens or fully autonomous lethal weapons; the department rejected them, insisting its software be available for "all lawful purposes".
- The Pentagon has designated Anthropic a national security supply chain risk under two separate laws. One case has been adjudicated in the Northern District of California; a second is pending before the D.C. Circuit, which Michael said has not granted a preliminary injunction and is expected to rule "in the next month or two".
- This is the first public figure on how far the migration has gone, and it comes from the department rather than from Anthropic, which is not quoted. DefenseScoop is the only outlet we could open with an in-window timestamp.
- DLA Chief Information Officer Adarryl Roberts said: "We have approximately 185 to 190 bots that are running. I'd say about 90% to 95% of those are unattended bots." In 2025 the bots saved the agency an estimated 300,000 hours of work.
- Roberts spoke at DLA's Industry Collider Day on 9 September in Alexandria, Virginia. The agency employs roughly 25,000 military and civilian personnel.
- DLA staff reach military-specific versions of ChatGPT and Grok, along with Gemini, through the genai.mil platform for sensitive-but-unclassified information, and the agency runs "GenAI 101 training" before moving staff toward agentic systems.
- The 300,000-hour figure is the agency's own estimate and the reports do not say how it was calculated or what it is measured against.
- Defense News reported on 11 September at 05:38 pm that DIU's "Space Threat Intelligence Synthesis Engine" solicitation closes on 24 September, and asks for "a latency delay of no more than five seconds — and preferably no more than two seconds" between data arriving and results displaying, with throughput of "20 to 30 megabytes per minute, with bursts of up to five gigabytes".
- The software must fuse "massive streams of multi-source data, including live video, satellite imagery, radar and sensor feeds, geospatial data, and classified intelligence reports".
- DIU's stated reason is that "Existing tools struggle to distinguish closely spaced objects, track emerging threats, and keep threat models current" — an unusually plain admission of where current space-domain awareness falls short.
- This is a solicitation, not an award; no vendor has been selected and no contract value is stated.
- Lt. Gen. Paul Stanton, director of the Defense Information Systems Agency, said on 10 September that decades of delayed maintenance have left Defense Department networks increasingly vulnerable in the AI age, and that the number of zero-day vulnerabilities has "multiplied by a factor of ten." On adversary automation he said: "The ways in which an adversary could employ cyber agents is mind-boggling in terms of the complexity."
- Stanton's stated remedy is to stop deferring patching and operating-system upgrades, treat networks as weapon systems, and train cyber operators on them the way combat troops train with weapons, with validated proficiency standards.
- On defensive AI specifically, DISA intends to require that human operators understand agent behaviour before deployment and to use digital twins to forecast the impact of an agent before it is let loose on a live network — a notably more cautious posture than commercial agent rollouts.
- No budget figures, timelines or patch backlog counts were given in the reporting, so the scale of the remediation task is not quantified.
- Reported 10 September: Rear Adm. Ronzelle Green becomes chief artificial intelligence officer at US Cyber Command. He previously led research and development at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, was CIO at the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency, and directed Commonwealth Integration in the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, working with Five Eyes partners.
- Budget documents cited in the reporting show the "AI for Cyber Operations" line rising from $5 million in fiscal 2026 to $138 million in fiscal 2027 — a roughly 27-fold increase. CYBERCOM states it "must field AI" capability to process data and identify threats faster than humans alone, to maintain decision superiority.
- Multiple sources in the report say Green's main task is consolidating fragmented AI pilots that currently run independently across different units — an organisational problem rather than a technical one.
- The budget figure is a request line, not appropriated spending, and the reporting does not specify which programmes it funds.
- The Wall Street Journal reported on 11 September, followed by Reuters, that the Department of Defense is in talks to lend $5 billion to AI cloud startup Fluidstack through its Office of Strategic Capital, which lends to companies in areas deemed critical to national security. It would be by far the office's largest loan.
- The reported purpose is not a new AI data centre but strengthening US manufacturing capacity and supply chains for the components data centres depend on — an industrial-policy move aimed at reducing foreign supplier dependence in AI infrastructure.
- This is talks, not a signed agreement. Neither the Pentagon nor Fluidstack commented, and the WSJ sourced the story to people familiar with the matter. The underlying WSJ and Reuters reports are paywalled or blocked to automated retrieval; the figures here are as relayed by Tech Startups.
- Watch for an OSC announcement confirming terms, and for which components are named — that would reveal where the government judges the AI supply chain to be most fragile.