- Pentagon staff create more than 100,000 AI agents using low-code tools
- Autonomous agents now manage approximately 25,000 daily Pentagon workflow sessions
- Routine Administrative Tasks Increasingly Automated on Unclassified Department of Defense Networks
Pentagon personnel are rapidly adopting vibe coding to create autonomous AI agents, at a rate that now exceeds 20,000 new tools each week on unclassified Defense Department networks.
More than 103,000 semi-autonomous agents were created in less than five weeks using a version of Google Gemini Agent Designer available through the GenAI.mil platform.
Usage is growing just as quickly, with these agents collectively running around 180,000 sessions each week, which equates to around 25,000 daily uses across the entire system.
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Low-code or no-code systems
Each session represents a single use of an agent by a user, meaning that widely adopted tools may be triggered thousands of times while more specialized tools only run occasionally.
Many of the most widely used agents handle repetitive staff tasks such as writing after-action reports, establishing formal staff estimates, analyzing images, and reviewing financial or strategic documents.
Staff build their own tools directly on the network, creating agents that automate routine digital work without requiring traditional programming knowledge.
“It’s a very exciting time,” Robert Malpass, deputy director for digital and AI for intelligence at the Pentagon, said at the INSA spring symposium.
“[Now] anyone within the Department can start developing and working with advanced AI in their own context, [customizing] the specific way they need this information to be processed, displayed and integrated into an operational workflow,” he added.
Officials say the system holds operating authorization at Impact Level 5, allowing agents to operate on unclassified networks while remaining within defined security and surveillance limits.
Some observers remain cautious about how quickly automated tools are spreading, pointing to incidents outside the Pentagon where poorly vetted agents have taken down systems, disrupted services or acted without clear human approval.
Defense executives say speed is becoming inevitable as technology cycles continue to compress and development timelines shorten.
“The cycles are getting shorter and shorter… as things move faster, as AI itself allows the speed of technology to increase,” said Andrew Mapes, acting deputy director for the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI officer, speaking at the INSA event.
“It’s our responsibility… to ensure that it doesn’t take five to 10 years to introduce something new into the military. We simply don’t have the luxury of taking such a deliberate approach,” he concluded.
Via Break the defense
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