Pete Hegseth’s New AI Defense Tool Rollout Immediately Derails
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rollout Tuesday of the U.S. military’s new AI platform fell flat.
“The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled AI,” Hegseth said in a statement. video onannouncing GenAi.Mil, the new “American-made” AI platform that will allow the military to “conduct in-depth research, format documents, and even analyze videos or images at unprecedented speed” – and all without using their brains.
Unfortunately for Hegseth, there was a slight problem with his message.
The name GenAi.Mil automatically produced a link to an empty website. So, X users thinking they were about to get a preview of the Army’s new chatbot were greeted with a message saying: “Error logging in or logging out/resetting before headers. Reset reason: connection interrupted.” Predictably, the platform isn’t actually accessible from external networks, but the shaky deployment has sparked eyerolls across the Internet.
A popular article on R/Army, the Reddit forum dedicated to military matters, suggested that service members had all received surprise invitations to use the new platform on their work computers. But having never heard of it before receiving the invitation, the user judged that it seemed “really suspicious”.
“Is this real and safe,” the user asked.
The invitation has a logo and a short link, but no indication of the actual purpose of the invitation. “Victory belongs to those who embrace true innovation and not the outdated systems of a bygone era. It is time to deliver effective and decisive results for the warfighter,” the electronic invitation reads. “I want YOU to use AI.”
The platform will host Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government, using retrieval-augmented generation to connect the large language model chatbot to Google Search “to ensure results are reliable and dramatic.” [reduce] the risk of AI hallucinations.
The Trump administration has been eager to embrace the AI industryand in July it awarded Google a massive $200 million contract to support AI solutions at DOD.
