Reuters sources say that during a White House event on Tuesday, the Pentagon’s Chief Technology Officer, Emil Michael, told industry representatives that the military wants AI models to be made available in both unclassified and classified domains.
“The Pentagon is moving to deploy frontier AI capabilities across all classification levels,” an anonymous official familiar with the matter said.
Current agreements between the Pentagon and AI companies are focused mainly on unclassified government networks. For example, OpenAI has agreed to allow its tools — including ChatGPT — to be used on a dedicated platform, genai.mil, which is already being used by more than 3 million U.S. Department of Defense employees, with some usage restrictions relaxed. Extending access to classified networks, however, would require a new or amended agreement.
Only one major AI company — Anthropic — currently allows limited use of its tools in classified environments, and only under its own usage policies. Representatives of Anthropic have made clear that they do not want their technologies to be deployed for tasks such as autonomous target selection or domestic surveillance, which would give military systems a high degree of operational autonomy.
The Pentagon’s push to make AI tools fully available across all network environments is controversial. Defense officials argue that commercial AI models should be used to support military operations as long as they comply with U.S. law. Technology experts, however, warn that generative models can sometimes produce inaccurate or misleading information — something that, in highly sensitive environments such as mission planning, could have serious consequences.
The talks with AI companies — including Alphabet (Google) and xAI, which have previously signed similar agreements for unclassified use of their tools — are part of a broader debate over how AI should be integrated into future warfare, where autonomous technologies, large-scale data analysis and cyber capabilities are expected to play an increasingly central role.