The Pentagon announced on Monday that it brought on Starshield AI’s Grok for Government and OpenAI’s ChatGPT for unclassified military use, expanding the number of AI assistants on the department’s platform. According to the Pentagon, Grok…
Page A8From§Eachthe early bird edition — 31 August 2026
Pentagon signs on with Grok and ChatGPT the same day it asks courts to fire 29 transgender troops.
As it ran on the front
The Department of Defense finalized agreements this week to bring Grok and ChatGPT into military workflows, a modernization step consistent with the Department's ongoing effort to maintain a technological edge over near-peer competitors. This is not a controversial position. Every serious analyst agrees the military needs cutting-edge tools, and generative language models represent exactly that kind of tool, the kind that — well, the kind that drafts emails and summarizes reports, mostly, at this stage, which is fine, that's a legitimate use of taxpayer funds.
Separately, and this really is a separate matter, the administration petitioned the Supreme Court to allow the immediate dismissal of 29 transgender service members. The official position is that this is about military readiness standards, uniformly applied, nothing about identity, purely about — did I say identity? I meant standards. The distinction matters. Readiness standards apply to everyone, which is why only these 29 are named in the filing, a number that is, if I'm being honest, oddly specific for a policy about uniform standards.…
…(cont) Now, is it a strange week to announce both of these on the same day? A reasonable person might ask why the Department can onboard two commercial chatbot subscriptions without a fitness review but cannot, apparently, retain 29 currently serving troops without one. I want to be clear that these are unrelated procurement and personnel processes running on entirely separate tracks, tracks that happen to intersect, this week, in the same press cycle, which — that's a coincidence of scheduling, not of priorities. It's not a priorities story. I need to be careful here, because it is starting to sound like one.
The Department stands by both decisions. It stands by the AI contracts as forward-looking. It stands by the dismissals as standards-based. It does not, as a matter of policy, comment on why the forward-looking decision costs money and the standards-based one saves none, because saving money was never the stated rationale, and I should not have implied that it was.
“They signed up for Grok and ChatGPT access the same day they went to the Supreme Court to fire 29 trans troops — one's a subscription, the other's 29 people's jobs, and somebody decided the chatbot was the safer bet. That's the ledger: money for the machine, pink slips for the humans in uniform. Follow the day it landed on and tell me that's a coincidence.”
“The Department of Defense is modernizing, that's not controversial, every serious analyst agrees the military needs cutting-edge tools. The dismissal filing is about readiness standards, uniformly applied, nothing about identity — did I say identity? I meant standards. It's a coincidence of scheduling that both landed the same day, not a coincidence of priorities. I should not have said priorities.”
The receipts
President Donald Trump has appealed to the Supreme Court to allow immediate firing of 29 active-duty transgender military service members.
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.