TL;DRGenAI.mil now has 1.5 million daily users, up from 80,000 at launch, after the Pentagon deployed Google Gemini and clarified AI usage rules.
The Pentagon’s generative AI platform, GenAI.mil, now has 1.5 million daily users across the Department of Defense, according to the department’s chief technology officer. The figure represents nearly half of the DoD’s 3.5 million workforce. Six months ago, the platform had fewer than 100,000 users.
Emil Michael, the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, disclosed the numbers at a Hudson Institute event last week. When GenAI.mil launched in December 2025, only 80,000 personnel were using it. Michael attributed the low initial adoption to confusion about where to find the tool, what it could be used for, and what the rules were.
“It wasn’t really clear where to go for it, what you could use it for, the rules were unclear, so we just blew through that,” Michael said.
The turning point was the deployment of Google’s Gemini on the Pentagon’s unclassified networks. After Gemini went live, daily usage surged. The Pentagon has since added OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok to the platform, giving all 3.5 million DoD employees access to multiple commercial AI models through a single portal.
