Pentagon says it is using AI to draft reports required by Congress

In short: The US Department of Defense says it is using generative AI to draft some reports that Congress requires, cutting writing time from weeks to hours.

What happened

Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael said the department can now feed background documents into a generative AI tool and ask it to draft a report for Congress. Generative AI is the kind of software that writes text based on patterns it learned from lots of examples, like an autocomplete that can produce full pages. Michael said work that used to take about 200 hours could be done in about five.

The Pentagon has made AI tools available through a system it calls GenAI.mil, which started rolling out widely in December 2025. Michael said usage has grown from about 80,000 people then to about 1.5 million people by June 2026, out of a total Defense workforce of about 3.5 million.

Another Defense official, Jacob Glassman, previously said he told a short-staffed team working on a required report to use GenAI.mil. According to DefenseScoop, the team later said the AI-assisted draft was the best report they had written in five years, but the specific report was not named.

Why it matters

Congressional reports are one of the main ways lawmakers keep track of what the military is doing and how it is spending taxpayer money. The Pentagon has to produce a large and growing number of these reports, rising from just over 500 in 2000 to more than 1,400 by 2020, according to the Government Accountability Office.

The open question is quality control. Other organizations have published AI-written material with mistakes, and the Pentagon has not clearly described what checks it uses to catch errors before reports go to Congress.

Source: Arstechnica