Pentagon Taps Former DOGE Official To Lead Its AI Efforts | EUROtoday

WASHINGTON, March 7 (Reuters) – The Pentagon on Friday named as Chief Data Officer Gavin Kliger, a pc scientist who aided billionaire Elon Musk’s efforts to overtake the federal government final yr and who has boosted white supremacists and misogynists on-line.

Reuters reported final yr that Kliger had reposted content material from white supremacist Nick Fuentes and self-described misogynist Andrew Tate and made some controversial feedback.

Kliger mentioned in an e mail that he was honored to tackle the brand new function and disputed allegations about his social media posts. “The suggestion that I support ‘bigots,’ ‘extremists,’ or white supremacists is categorically untrue,” he mentioned.

In a social media submit, the Pentagon mentioned Kliger’s new function “places him at the center of the Department’s most ambitious AI efforts,” specializing in “day-to-day alignment and execution of the Department’s AI projects, working directly with America’s frontier AI labs to support the warfighter.”

The Pentagon didn’t instantly reply to a Reuters request for extra remark.

The Pentagon’s use of AI has taken heart stage after a heated weeks-long dispute with Anthropic over guardrails on how the navy can use its AI instruments led to final week’s resolution by the Trump administration to drop the corporate and substitute it with OpenAI.

On Thursday, the Pentagon gave Anthropic a proper supply-chain threat designation – a unprecedented rebuke by the administration towards a U.S. tech firm that started working with the Pentagon sooner than its rivals and was extra aggressive in courting U.S. national-security officers. But the corporate and the Pentagon have been at odds for months over how the navy can use its know-how on the battlefield. This battle erupted into public view earlier this yr.

Anthropic has refused to again down on bans for its Claude AI to energy autonomous weapons and mass U.S. surveillance. The Pentagon has pushed again, saying it ought to be capable of use this know-how as wanted, as long as it complies with U.S. regulation.

(Reporting by Alexandra Alper and Raphael Satter; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Louise Heavens and Tomasz Janoski)