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A hot potato: When it comes to AI, Google has left its "do no harm" stance firmly in the past. The Pentagon has just announced GenAI.mil, a generative AI platform that will offer Google Cloud’s Gemini as its first available AI tool. Secretary of Defense/War Pete Hegseth said that the platform will make "our fighting force more lethal than ever before."

"The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled AI," Hegseth said. "As technologies advance, so do our adversaries. But here at the War Department, we are not sitting idly by."

The secretary added that the Pentagon will continue to "aggressively field the world’s best technology to make our fighting force more lethal than ever before."

Today, we are unleashing https://t.co/NzcgVsCcI2

This platform puts the worlds most powerful frontier AI models directly into the hands of every American warrior.

We will continue to aggressively field the world’s best technology to make our fighting force more lethal than ever… pic.twitter.com/jqAhN32zjQ

– Secretary of War Pete Hegseth (@SecWar) December 9, 2025

Google’s press release focuses on the less-lethal capabilities of Gemini for Government, such as enabling Google-quality enterprise search, summarizing policy handbooks, generating checklists, and creating risk assessments for operational planning.

Google emphasized that the platform can only be used for unclassified work, and that the data will not be used to train Google’s public models.

Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emi Michal said that the GenAI.mil platform will offer other AI models in the future. This year has seen other big AI players, including xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic and Scale AI, sign contracts with the Pentagon.

In February, Google removed a key passage from its AI principles that previously committed to avoiding the use of AI in potentially harmful applications, opening the door for military applications.

This isn’t Google’s first defense contract. In 2018, the tech giant worked with the agency on Project Maven, which was primarily focused on using machine learning and AI to identify vehicles and other objects in drone footage in order to reduce the workload for human analysts. It led to over 3,100 employees signing a letter opposing Google’s involvement in the program.

In July 2025, Google was awarded a $200 million contract to support the DoD’s Artificial Intelligence Office to deploy its frontier AI tools and cloud infrastructure.

The use of AI for military or similar purposes has long been a contentious issue. OpenAI, for example, has teamed up with Oculus founder Palmer Luckey’s Anduril defense firm to deploy advanced artificial intelligence solutions for national security missions.

Earlier this week, Luckey said that AI should be allowed to decide who lives and dies when the technology is deployed on the battlefield. Luckey said he believes that the important thing is to be as effective as possible, "So, to me, there’s no moral high ground in using inferior technology."