Pentagon Workers Vibe-Code 100,000 AI ‘Agents’ on Unclassified Networks
WASHINGTON — Military personnel and Defense Department civilians have used a version of Google Gemini’s Agent Designer to create over 100,000 semi-autonomous AI agents in less than five weeks since the tool became available, a Pentagon official told Breaking Defense.
“We’ve seen remarkable adoption since its launch, with over 103,000 agents built and a total of more than 1.1 million agent sessions recorded” as of mid-April on GenAI.mil, the official said. “We are currently averaging about 180,000 sessions each week.”
A “session” is one agent getting used one time by one user. A popular agent may account for thousands of sessions with thousands of different users each week, while a niche tool may only get used by one person once.
Agentic AI is an evolution of generative AIs like Gemini or ChatGPT. Instead of just answering a user’s questions, the way a chatbot does, agents can take a human user’s instructions and act on them, for example by replying to emails, updating software, or compiling source materials and drafting a report on them.
For the Pentagon, the AI agents have formal Authorization to Operate (ATO) at Impact Level 5, meaning they can be used for unclassified tasks.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said some of the most popular agents on the Pentagon system automate standard staff work, like drafting an After Action Report on lessons-learned or a formal “staff estimate” of what’s required to execute an operation. (The emphasis is on “draft,” not “write,” since a human user is supposed to review the AI’s output before submitting it.)
Other available agents analyze imagery and generate a written report describing it, according to the official Pentagon announcement on X.com, while yet others analyze financial data or official strategy documents.
But users aren’t limited to a set menu of pre-built agents. Instead, as the name implies, Agent Designer and tools like it allow anyone to create their own agents and employ them on the network. The user doesn’t even need to know how to write software or train a neural net: These are “low-code/no-code” chatbots that guide the user through the process of figuring out what they want to accomplish, in natural language, and then autonomously code the agent to their specifications — a process often disparaged as “vibe-coding.”
Officials have been enthusiastic about this explosion of agents, seeing it as the next logical step in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s push to empower personnel with generative AI.
A “session” is one agent getting used one time by one user. A popular agent may account for thousands of sessions with thousands of different users each week, while a niche tool may only get used by one person once.
Agentic AI is an evolution of generative AIs like Gemini or ChatGPT. Instead of just answering a user’s questions, the way a chatbot does, agents can take a human user’s instructions and act on them, for example by replying to emails, updating software, or compiling source materials and drafting a report on them.
For the Pentagon, the AI agents have formal Authorization to Operate (ATO) at Impact Level 5, meaning they can be used for unclassified tasks.
The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said some of the most popular agents on the Pentagon system automate standard staff work, like drafting an After Action Report on lessons-learned or a formal “staff estimate” of what’s required to execute an operation. (The emphasis is on “draft,” not “write,” since a human user is supposed to review the AI’s output before submitting it.)
Other available agents analyze imagery and generate a written report describing it, according to the official Pentagon announcement on X.com, while yet others analyze financial data or official strategy documents.
But users aren’t limited to a set menu of pre-built agents. Instead, as the name implies, Agent Designer and tools like it allow anyone to create their own agents and employ them on the network. The user doesn’t even need to know how to write software or train a neural net: These are “low-code/no-code” chatbots that guide the user through the process of figuring out what they want to accomplish, in natural language, and then autonomously code the agent to their specifications — a process often disparaged as “vibe-coding.”
Officials have been enthusiastic about this explosion of agents, seeing it as the next logical step in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s push to empower personnel with generative AI.
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