The US Army Is Using ‘CamoGPT’ to Purge DEI From Training Materials
Credit to Author: Jared Keller| Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2025 13:34:39 +0000
The United States Army is employing a prototype generative artificial intelligence tool to identify references to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) for removal from training materials in line with a recent executive order from President Donald Trump.
Officials at the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC)—the major command responsible for training soldiers, developing leaders, and shaping the service’s guidelines, strategies, and concepts—are currently using the AI tool, dubbed CamoGPT, to “review policies, programs, publications, and initiatives for DEIA and report findings,” according to an internal memo reviewed by WIRED.
The memo followed Trump’s signing of a January 27 executive order entitled, “Restoring America’s Fighting Force,” which directed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to eliminate all Pentagon policies seen as promoting what that the commander-in-chief declared “un-American, divisive, discriminatory, radical, extremist, and irrational theories” regarding race and gender, a linguistic dragnet that extends as far as past social media posts from official US military accounts.
In an email to WIRED, TRADOC spokesman Army Maj. Chris Robinson confirmed the use of CamoGPT to review DEIA materials.
“[TRADOC] will fully execute and implement all directives outlined in the Executive Orders issued by the President. We ensure that these directives are carried out with the utmost professionalism, efficiency, and in alignment with national security objectives,” Robinson says. “Specific details about internal policies and tactics cannot be discussed. However, the use of all tools in our portfolio, including CamoGPT, to increase productivity at all levels can and will be used.”
Developed last summer to boost productivity and operational readiness across the US Army, CamoGPT currently has around 4,000 users who “interact” with it on a daily basis, Capt. Aidan Doyle, a CamoGPT data engineer, tells WIRED. The tool is used for everything from developing comprehensive training program materials to producing multilingual translations, with TRADOC providing a “proof of concept and demonstration” at last October’s annual Association of the United States Army (AUSA) conference in Washington, DC, according to Robinson.
While Doyle declined to comment on the specifics on how TRADOC officials were likely using the CamoGPT to scan for DEIA-related policies, he described the process of searching through documents as relatively straightforward.
“I would take all the documentation you want to examine, order it all in a collection on CamoGPT, and then ask questions about the documents,” he says. “The way retrieval-augmented generation works is that the more specific your question is to the concepts inside the document, the more detailed information the model will provide back.”
In practical terms, this means that TRADOC officials are likely inputting a large number of documents into CamoGPT and asking the LLM to scan for targeted keywords like “dignity” or “respect” (which, yes, the Army is currently using to screen past digital content) to identify materials for subsequent alteration and bring them in line with Trump’s executive order.
By using CamoGPT, the work of eliminating DEIA-related content will likely result in a rapid change to the US Army’s documentation. “We’re competing with ‘control+F’ in Adobe Acrobat,” Doyle says.
CamoGPT isn’t the only AI chatbot in the Pentagon’s arsenal: The US Air Force’s NIPRGPT has seen extensive use among airmen since its launch in June for “summarization of documents, drafting of documents and coding assistance,” according to DefenseScoop.
The AI-assisted assessment of US military training materials comes amid a government-wide effort to root out DEIA initiated the day Trump returned to the Oval Office in January to start his second term. Detailed in Trump’s January 27 executive order, the Defense Department’s purge has taken the form of the closure of service-specific DEIA offices and program, a department-wide review of past DEI initiatives, and even the removal of historical content related to the famed all-Black Tuskegee Airmen from Air Force basic training materials, the latter of which was swiftly reversed amid public outcry.
Originally inspired by the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in November 2022, CamoGPT is a product of the Army’s Artificial Intelligence Integration Center (AI2C), the organization formed in 2018 as part of Army Future Command to spearhead AI research and development efforts by “leveraging a soldier workforce to build experimental prototypes,” as Eric Schmitz, AI2C’s operations and intelligence portfolio lead, tells WIRED.
“The mission is to make AI accessible to the Army through experimentation, and we have an ethos and culture that is very much a start-up ethos.” Schmitz says. “We are product-centric and believe AI is inherently software-driven: You can do all the research you like in academia, but if you don't have software to deliver it to somebody and find out if it's useful software, then you’ll never know if your AI is useful in the real world.”
In response to the arrival of ChatGPT, AI2C quickly spun up a CamoGPT prototype based on an open-source LLM in June 2024. The center’s approach to CamoGPT is “model agnostic,” according to Schmitz: While the system currently relies on tech giant Meta’s open-source Llama 3.3 70B LLM, the underlying model is “expendable” should a better version hit the market. What really matters is building software that the average soldier will actually use in their day-to-day operations, an achievement that might influence its long-term adoption across the force.
“When you talk about how the Army doesn’t build software well, it’s because user adoption is not a priority, but it’s a massive priority to us,” Schmitz says.
Whether CamoGPT proliferates more broadly across the Army remains to be seen, and Schmitz and Doyle emphasized that AI2C’s role is laser-focused on experimental prototyping rather than building products ready for immediate fielding. But with the entire federal government reorienting itself in the name of “efficiency,” the success of CamoGPT’s application to Trump’s DEIA overhaul may end up cementing its utility for military planners.
“You need to be ruthlessly critical of what you have built and what you plan to build and hyper focused on driving user adoption,” Schmitz says. “The core question is: How do you build something that’s so valuable that people say they can't live without it?”