Pentagon boasts of using AI to write reports mandated by Congress (1.5mil users)

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/pentagon-boasts-of-using-ai-to-write-reports-mandated-by-congress/

52•FrustratedMonky•2h ago

Comments

FrustratedMonky•2h ago

Literally on the timeline for AI-2027.

https://ai-2027.com/

<edit> AI-2027, not Project 2027

FrustratedMonky•2h ago

Not sure why the downvote.

Part of AI-2027, one of the early steps, was government dependance on AI for routine jobs. They become dependent on AI, and thus less willing to slow down or put on any guard rails. Because they can't live without it, they keep accelerating.

lelandfe•1h ago

Likely because they said Project 2027 which is something different

FrustratedMonky•1h ago

Did not realize there was a follow on to Project 2025, called 2027.

lelandfe•1h ago

evokes something different/doesn't exist

At minimum that link does not describe a project and does not use that Proper Noun

cyanydeez•2h ago

ok, first, this isn't superhuman AI; this is slop production at scale. we could do these with markov chains decades ago.

The only difference now is the slop looks critically better, but there's no quality accounting.

FrustratedMonky•57m ago

In AI-2027, there are many stages before superhuman AI. Military dependence on AI was one of them. This dependence creates incentive to do anything to not slow down, including ignoring any safety concerns.

defmetrix•2h ago

I have no problem with this. If the AI has access to the funding and schedule data, it will probably give a more honest answer that the humans. And in reality, nobody in congress is going to take the time to read the report anyways. They will just vote the way they are told.

cyanydeez•2h ago

Me either, bullshit vs bullshit AI is exactly the same. It's not like this administration was going to produce anything of merit anyway, so why not just go as quickly as possible to the bullshit instead of this 2weeks song and dance.

FatherOfCurses•2h ago

You're assuming the AI will not be given any instructions to produce the report with a certain data bias.

creaghpatr•1h ago

If so, that would be auditable (in theory; whether it would be audited in practice, probably not).

galleywest200•1h ago

How many audits has the Pentagon failed in recent years?

warkdarrior•1h ago

It's true that Pentagon audits failed to account for hundreds of billions of dollars. https://econofact.org/factbrief/has-the-pentagon-failed-its-...

But I am sure future audits will succeed in tracking down all of the prompts used for AI-generated reports. /s

FrustratedMonky•2h ago

The shocking part of the story is the scale.

1.5 Million Users just within the Pentagon?

"The Pentagon has made AI tools, starting with Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government, widely available to members of all six military branches through the department’s bespoke GenAI.mil platform since December 2025."

"The number of Department of Defense personnel using commercial AI tools such as Gemini through GenAI.mil has significantly increased from just 80,000 in December 2025 to 1.5 million in June 2026, the Pentagon CTO claimed during his remarks at the Hudson Institute."

not_a_bot_4sho•2h ago

"The Department of Defense is the country’s largest employer, with more than 2.1 million Military Service members and over 811 thousand civilian employees."

From https://comptroller.war.gov/Portals/45/Documents/afr/fy2024/...

tananaev•2h ago

Presumably the whole point of AI is that we can start reducing that number. I am sure there's a significant number of people just working on various administrative tasks processing data and documents.

thatguy0900•1h ago

That's exactly what I want from the Pentagon, less real humans involved and more automated systems that don't even have the concept of morality and the social responsibility to be a potential whistleblower

jimt1234•

josefritzishere•2h ago

AI slop reports from lazy, incompetent leaders? I'm shocked!

CGMthrowaway•1h ago

Half of those leaders are Democrats. They're not all lazy and incompetent.

dbvn•1h ago

The reports will be just as useless as they were before

arjie•1h ago

This is wonderful. Many of these reports are makework paperwork. One even wonders if pushing for them is just taking a page from the CIA Sabotage Manual and applying it to us. Considering Congress members barely read the bills they’re voting on, it’s probably insignificant that this pointless paperwork is dispensed with.

When we finally end Environmental Impact Reports by generating them at scale with AI we will finally be able to escape this plateau of ossification.

I’m not particularly attached to bullshit being manufactured by human minds.

pstuart•43m ago

> Considering Congress members barely read the bills they’re voting on

That seems like a good opportunity for AI to be used as a summary.

And on other fun note, in many cases Congress does not even write the bill, their patrons do and have them pretend to represent it.

advisedwang•38m ago

If these reports truly are so bad, the law should be changed to stop requiring them. But, lawmakers aren't choosing to do that. Maybe there's actually some good reasons for them to exist.

htx80nerd•56m ago

if any (D) President did the same thing there would be 250 comments talking about how amazing this is. a true step into our future, etc. (R) man bad. everything (R) man does is bad. I know this cuz the Media and Experts tell me!

advisedwang•37m ago

You are getting mad at something you made up yourself

dnw•38m ago

Similar to Paperwork Reduction Act, we may need Slop Reduction Act.

SoftTalker•25m ago

And Congressional staffers will be using AI to summarize the reports, no doubt.

clickety_clack•11m ago

A great way to undermine government would be to get them locked on Lines of Report (LoR) pushed to congress each month.

BurningFrog•1h ago

Everyone is starting to use AI. I use three AIs daily. Why would the US military be different?

FrustratedMonky•1h ago

I think, assume. With the Military, with the goal of killing people, that there is assumption of more human judgment being involved. Beyond even the issue of a man-in-the-loop for targeting systems. But even generally, that these are big decisions that shouldn't be farmed out completely.

BurningFrog•26m ago

There are 3 million people working in the US military.

Very few of them ever come close to killing anyone.

Mostly they're white collar workers doing regular desk jobs, where AI is just as useful as in other industries.

vjvjvjvjghv•21m ago

A military is usually a big supply chain operation with an attached small war fighting branch

otikik•1h ago

Well, you are not the Pentagon.

I presume they might view their internal data being used to train a private company's training sets as a concern.

ribosometronome•1h ago

There are a solutions, like Amazon Bedrock, that allow model usage with strict data control.

vitally3643•1h ago

How many of your tasks decide whether entire populations of human beings live or die?

Epic Games announces Lore version control system

Launch HN: Adam (YC W25) – Open-Source AI CAD

Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis

Show HN: An 8-bit live gamecast for baseball

French physicist and media star loses doctorate after plagiarism investigation

Trellis AI (YC W24) hiring a product lead to build agents for healthcare access

Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

RFC 10008: The new HTTP Query Method

US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks

Want your images back? That'll be $5

Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users

MicroUI – A tiny, portable, immediate-mode UI library written in ANSI C

Hacker News but for independent blogs

AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation

Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

Agentic coding deserves more than a chat box bolted onto VS Code

U.S. science is in chaos

GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17

Image Compression

Running local models is good now

Kirkland Roundabouts

Show HN: High-Res Neural Cellular Automata

Abandoned and Little-Known Airfields

The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

Show HN: Deconvolution – a Rust image deconvolution and restoration crate

Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)

The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd

Why stdx is not on crates.io

Epic Games announces Lore version control system

Launch HN: Adam (YC W25) – Open-Source AI CAD

Anthropic employees accuse Trump administration of targeting them

GLM-5.2 is the new leading open weights model on Artificial Analysis

Show HN: An 8-bit live gamecast for baseball

French physicist and media star loses doctorate after plagiarism investigation

Trellis AI (YC W24) hiring a product lead to build agents for healthcare access

Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff

RFC 10008: The new HTTP Query Method

US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks

Want your images back? That'll be $5

Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users

MicroUI – A tiny, portable, immediate-mode UI library written in ANSI C

Hacker News but for independent blogs

AI demands more engineering discipline. Not less

Show HN: Inkwash, a watercolor sketching app and explanation

Why thinking out loud with someone beats thinking alone

Agentic coding deserves more than a chat box bolted onto VS Code

U.S. science is in chaos

GrapheneOS has been ported to Android 17

Image Compression

Running local models is good now

Kirkland Roundabouts

Show HN: High-Res Neural Cellular Automata

Abandoned and Little-Known Airfields

The founder's playbook: Building an AI-native startup

Show HN: Deconvolution – a Rust image deconvolution and restoration crate

Why do commercial spaces sit vacant? (2025)

The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd

Why stdx is not on crates.io

Pentagon boasts of using AI to write reports mandated by Congress (1.5mil users)

Comments