Pete Hegseth Botches Rollout of AI Tool for “American Warrior”
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rollout Tuesday of the U.S. military’s new AI platform just fell flat on its face.
“The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled A-I,” Hegseth said in a video on X, announcing GenAi.Mil, the new “American-made” AI platform that will allow military members to “conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed”—and all without using their brains.
Unfortunately for Hegseth, his post presented a slight problem.
The name GenAi.Mil automatically produced a link to an empty website. So X users thinking they were about to get a sneak peak at the military’s new chatbot were greeted by a message reading: “Upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection termination.” Predictably, the platform can’t actually be accessed from external networks, but the wonky rollout triggered eyerolls across the internet.
One popular post 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 about it before receiving the invite, the user deemed that it looked “really suspicious.”
“Is it real and safe,” the user asked.
The invite features a logo and short link, but no indication of what the invitation is actually for. “Victory belongs to those who embrace real innovation not antiquated systems of a bygone era. It’s time to deliver efficient, decisive results for the warfighter,” the e-vite reads. “I want YOU to use AI.”
The platform will house Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government, using a retrieval-augmented generation to connect the large language model chatbot to Google Search “to ensure outputs are reliable and dramatically [reduce] the risk of AI hallucinations.”
The Trump administration has been eager to embrace the AI industry, and in July, it awarded Google a massive $200 million contract to support AI solutions at the DOD.