The Pentagon claims a 1,775% boost in AI use is paying off the DOGE promise a year later—but adoption is still under 50%

The U.S. Department of Defense says its AI use is surging and boosting its efficiency, but less than half of agency employees are deploying the technology. And the jury is out on whether the work product is actually any good. Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael said in a recent event with Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank, that the use of AI across the agency has proliferated, revealing that 80,000 personnel were using commercial AI tools as of December 2025, and that number has grown to 1.5 million personnel as of this month. The Department of Defense has about 3.5 million employees, meaning less than half, roughly 43%, of agency employees are using AI. It’s a loaded topic, not least because the short-lived stint of Elon Musk at the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) started with grand claims of AI efficiencies that led to mass layoffs and not much evidence of anything else. A closer look into Michael’s claims suggest that the adoption is surging, yet struggling in ways that mirror wider adoption problems inside the Fortune 500. Government AI use has definitely ballooned in recent years, with the Office of Management and Budget disclosing more than 3,600 active or planned use cases for the technology last year, a 70% increase from the year before. Beyond generating Congressional reports, these use cases include The Federal Bureau of Prisons developing a system to assess “potential for misconduct for newly admitted inmates” and assign security levels to incarcerated individuals. Court documents reveal DOGE used ChatGPT to flag diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives receiving federal funding and cancelled one museum’s $350,000 grant to replace its heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system. AI deployment in the agency snowballed following the creation of DOGE, which effectively replaced the U.S. Digital Services, an Obama administration-era initiative to modernize agency technology. In 2025, Google and other U.S. tech