The US Department of Defense has a lot of congressionally mandated homework to do every year involving hundreds of required reports on various national security topics. But Pentagon officials have been proudly describing a new shortcut—using generative AI tools to write such reports for Congress.

Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael highlighted AI-generated reports to Congress as a key example of how the Department of Defense—stylized as the Department of War under the Trump administration—has adopted generative AI during an event hosted by the Hudson Institute think tank in Washington, DC, on June 12. 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.

“I have to report to Congress every year on this thing,” Michael said. “Let me load all the papers onto it and have it draft me a congressional report that would otherwise take 200 hours of staffing time and do it in five hours.”

More evidence of such AI usage came from previous comments by Jacob Glassman, deputy assistant secretary of defense for science and technology foundations at the US Department of Defense, during the Box Federal Summit held in Washington, DC, on April 23. According to DefenseScoop coverage, Glassman described how he told a short-staffed team responsible for delivering a congressionally mandated report to “use GenAI.mil, do the best you can.”

The team supposedly came back to Glassman a week later, claiming that the AI-generated report was “the best report we’ve written in the past five years.” As DefenseScoop notes, Glassman did not identify the report in question.

The Department of Defense has long struggled to deliver such reports to Congress efficiently and in a timely manner, especially as the number of mandated reports generally rises with every new defense appropriations bill passed by Congress. The number of reports had soared from just over 500 reports in 2000 to more than 1,400 reports by 2020, according to the US Government Accountability Office.

Officials at the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs typically have to go through defense authorization statutes “almost line by line” to find the latest reporting requirements, said Elizabeth Field, former senior executive director at the Government Accountability Office, in a Federal News Network interview in 2023. Her GAO report showed how the Pentagon’s painstaking process of identifying the reporting requirements and assigning reports to the appropriate team could take between three and six months—and some of the Congressionally mandated reports are due within a year.

The perils of pushing AI adoption

Given that tedious process, it’s not surprising that the Pentagon’s current leadership may find AI-generated reports to be a tempting shortcut. But other organizations, such as law firms and major consulting firms, have already discovered the many pitfalls of relying on error-ridden AI-generated writing without adequate human vetting and oversight.

One of the latest cautionary tales involved the multinational consulting giant KPMG publishing a report about AI use in businesses that featured case studies with numerous AI-generated errors and false claims, as revealed by the research group GPTZero and reported by the Financial Times. The revelations led KPMG to pull the report titled “Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI.”

It’s unclear what processes the Pentagon has in place to review the accuracy of its AI-generated reports to Congress. But such reports are a crucial element of congressional oversight intended to hold the US military accountable for how it uses taxpayer dollars—and so any AI-induced errors or mischaracterizations could undermine the accountability mechanism of such reports. This also comes at a time when the Pentagon has requested an unprecedented $1.5 trillion budget for the 2027 fiscal year.

Members of the US military have also been using generative AI tools to write personnel evaluation reports for non-commissioned officers and commissioned officers, generate commendation medal citations, and create counseling statements, according to a Small Wars Journal article.

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. The Department of Defense has an overall workforce of approximately 3.5 million.

Google is among multiple US tech companies that signed agreements in 2025 with the US General Services Administration to make their AI tools available across federal government agencies for deeply discounted prices.

On May 1, the Department of Defense announced new agreements with “eight of the world’s leading frontier artificial intelligence companies” to deploy more AI tools on classified networks for “lawful operational use.” Those companies include SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Reflection AI, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle.

The US government has not divulged how much it is paying the companies under the new contracts. But the list notably excludes Anthropic, which was blacklisted by the Trump administration after the tech company supposedly refused to allow its Claude AI models to be used in an unrestricted manner for autonomous warfare and mass surveillance.