Pentagon Taps Gavin Kliger as CDO Amid AI Push

Gavin Kliger is the Pentagon’s new chief data officer, placing him at the center of the War Department’s most ambitious AI efforts, the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering announced Friday. 

“Mr. Kliger will be a key leader in executing the department’s AI strategy. He will focus on the day-to-day alignment and execution of the department’s AI projects, working directly with America’s frontier AI labs to support the warfighter. His oversight will ensure these projects maintain strategic focus, secure critical data access, and deliver transformative capabilities at record speed,” the post said.  

AI Expansion Across the Pentagon

Previously, Kliger served on the DOW’s Department of Government Efficiency team, where he helped launch the department’s AI platform, GenAI.mil. The platform, which went live in December 2025, reached one million unique users just two months later.

“The fact that we’re already at 1.1 million users, we’re already changing the culture, and we have not even remotely started,” said Deputy Assistant Secretary for Science and Technology Foundations Jacob Glassman at GovCIO Media & Research’s Defense IT Summit last week. “This is just generative AI, wait until we get into agentic workflows. It’s now very quickly becoming default part of our workforce’s workflow, and that’s what I consider a win.”

The DOW built on that momentum by partnering with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into GenAI.mil, furthering its mission to become “an AI-first enterprise.”  

“We are in a global competition for military AI dominance, and America must build on its leadership to extend our advantage over adversaries,” said Kliger in the post.  

Kliger’s appointment comes just a week after a public fallout between the Pentagon and AI company Anthropic. The conflict began when Anthropic declined to grant the department unrestricted access to its Claude models and sought assurances its technology would not be used for fully autonomous weapons or domestic mass surveillance. The Pentagon subsequently moved to phase out Anthropic’s technology and labeled the company a supply chain risk, a designation typically reserved for foreign companies.

Pentagon Speeds Tech Deployment

Translating technology into battlefield advantage has been a main goal for War Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has pushed to overhaul technology acquisition. The Pentagon released new guidance in January formalizing a restructuring of agencies and new processes to collapse acquisition timelines. 

“Mission command governs this ecosystem: we set intent, set priorities, remove blockers and hold leaders accountable for measurable outcomes,” Hegseth wrote in the “Innovation Ecosystem” memo. “Every organization in this ecosystem will strive to deliver warfighting advantage faster than our adversaries can adapt.” 

The reorganization centers on a new Warfighting Acquisitions System and a revamped requirements process intended to replace legacy structures that Hegseth has criticized in recent speeches as slow, risk-averse and disconnected from operational needs.

The reforms include establishing a Requirements and Resourcing Alignment Board to link funding directly to top warfighting priorities, creating a Mission Engineering and Integration Activity to accelerate experimentation and prototyping and standing up a Joint Acceleration Reserve to help promising technologies cross the “valley of death” between development and deployment.

“My mission is to integrate the unparalleled innovation of America’s private sector with the Department’s operational expertise to rapidly deliver advanced AI capabilities to our warfighters,” Kliger said. “By driving pace-setting projects with wartime urgency, we will ensure cutting-edge technology translates into decisive battlefield advantages for the United States.”