The U.S. Army is heavily utilizing artificial intelligence tools to enhance decision-making, automate back-office functions, and develop new capabilities for battlefield awareness and autonomous systems, Military.com reports.
Several new initiatives and more aggressive steps to implement AI have become publicly visible in 2025, including the Department of Defense awarding contracts to major frontier AI firms like Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAi to prototype “agentic” AI workflows across intelligence, warfighting, enterprise and mission areas.
In July 2025, the Trump administration released “Winning the AI Race: America’s AI Action Plan,” which outlines a military AI strategy focused on rapid adoption and technological dominance.
The plan includes several specific directives for the Department of Defense (DoD) like calling for the U.S. military to “aggressively adopt AI” to maintain its global preeminence.
Other orders include identifying where AI-based automation can permanently improve efficiency and effectiveness; creating an “AI & Autonomous Systems Virtual Proving Ground” to accelerate testing and development; codifying the DoD’s “priority access” to computing resources from private-sector partners such as cloud providers during a national emergency; and establishing AI talent development programs to meet workforce requirements and build resilience against threats such as adversarial attacks and data poisoning.
The DoD is asking for a separate, dedicated budget line of $13.4 billion for autonomy and AI systems, covering unmanned and autonomous vehicles across air, land, and sea, in its fiscal year 2026 budget request, the first time the Pentagon has broken these capabilities out into their own category.
“Today, a new frontier of scientific discovery lies before us, defined by transformative technologies such as artificial intelligence,” President Donald Trump said in the July 2025 release.
“Breakthroughs in these fields have the potential to reshape the global balance of power, spark entirely new industries, and revolutionize the way we live and work. As our global competitors race to exploit these technologies, it is a national security imperative for the United States to achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance. To secure our future, we must harness the full power of American innovation.”
The tensions among the U.S., China, and Russia make AI a central front in future military competition. China is investing heavily in generative AI and large language model (LLM) capabilities tailored to military and intelligence tasks while Russia is reorganizing its structure to emphasize unmanned and autonomous systems.
Moscow has already used loitering munitions, strike drones, and autonomous (or semi-autonomous) systems in Ukraine, though often under human supervision, according to Le Monde.
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