The US Army is developing AI models trained on data from real missions, with the goal of deploying a chatbot specifically for soldiers. “We have all of these lessons learned from missions like the Ukraine-Russia War and Operation Epic Fury,” says Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, in an interview with WIRED. “There is a huge amount of knowledge available.” Miller showed WIRED a prototype of the system, called Victor, that combines a Reddit-like forum with a chatbot called VictorBot to help troops surface useful information, like the best way to configure electromagnetic warfare systems for a particular mission. When a soldier asks how to set up their hardware, VictorBot generates an answer and points to relevant posts and comments from other service members. “Electromagnetic warfare is such a hard topic,” Miller says. Victor, he adds, “can generate a response and cite all of the lessons learned from [different] units.” The Pentagon has ramped up its efforts to incorporate AI into military systems over the past two years, but Victor is a rare example of the military building AI for itself. The project shows how keen the US military is to master the nuts and bolts of AI—and how the technology may be poised to transform daily life for many troops. Miller says the Army is working with a third-party vendor that will run and fine-tune the AI models that power Victor. He declined to name the specific firm because the contract has not yet been announced. He says that more than 500 repositories of data have been fed into the system, and notes that Victor will seek to reduce the potential for errors in a similar way to commercial chatbots, by citing factual sources. Efforts to integrate AI into military systems accelerated following the introduction of ChatGPT in 2022. More recently, Anthropic’s technology reportedly played a prominent role in planning operations in Iran through a system powered by Palantir. As these systems have grown more capable, howev