The Pentagon added custom builds of OpenAI's ChatGPT and xAI's Grok to its central GenAI.mil portal on August 31, opening two more frontier AI models to 3 million U.S. Department of Defense personnel and cementing the department's multi-model procurement strategy.
ChatGPT Mil and Grok for Government join Gemini on GenAI.mil
ChatGPT Mil, spun out of OpenAI's new OpenAI for Government program, is tuned for controlled-unclassified-information (CUI) workflows — administrative, logistics, policy and planning tasks that eat most of the DoD's daily document work. It joins Google Gemini, which anchored the portal when it launched on December 9, 2025 on Google Cloud infrastructure.
Grok for Government positioned for mission workflows
xAI's Grok for Government is being delivered through SpaceX's Starshield AI unit and framed in more operational terms. The Defense Department said the tool will help "execute missions faster and with greater precision across numerous operational contexts, ranging from market research analysis for acquisition professionals to supply chain management for logisticians." Starshield is SpaceX's secure satellite network built on Starlink hardware.
1.7 million users already onboarded
GenAI.mil has already onboarded more than 1.7 million of the department's 3 million military and civilian personnel, according to the DoD. The portal is meant to keep sensitive prompts and files off consumer channels while giving warfighters the same conversational tooling their commercial peers have had for months.
Anthropic still on the outside
Notably absent from the lineup is Anthropic's Claude, which the Trump administration labeled a supply-chain risk after Anthropic declined to give the Pentagon unrestricted use of its models and insisted on safety guardrails. Anthropic is fighting the designation in court. The department has separately inked classified-network deals with AWS and NVIDIA, Microsoft and Reflection AI, part of a broader push captured in this week's DHS counter-drone awards to Anduril and Booz Allen.
Reporting based on coverage from TechCrunch, Defense One, DefenseScoop and the Department of War press office.