The move comes amid a broader modernization push by special ops forces and the Defense Department to add new digital tools and robotic platforms to their arsenal.

In a new subsection for “Advanced Autonomy and Artificial Intelligence,” the amended BAA for technology development noted that SOF is keen on “modular, open integration” of cutting‐edge solutions incorporating AI and machine learning to enable enhanced autonomy in unmanned systems.

“Specific areas of interest include but are not limited to agentic AI and vision language action (VLA) models to achieve more sophisticated autonomous behaviors like adaptive learning; neural radiance fields (NeRFs) for 3D scene representation and navigation; generative AI for simulation and data augmentation; advanced automatic target recognition (ATR) algorithms with edge node refinement and autonomous model retraining; advanced machine learning operations (MLOPs) to support data management, model training, validation, and monitoring,” officials wrote.

They noted that proposed solutions need to be designed with well‐defined interfaces and adherence to open standards to promote interoperability and integration into existing architectures.

Earlier this year, the command re-released its “SOF Renaissance” strategic vision, which observed that innovations in AI, autonomous systems and cyber tools are reshaping warfare and enhancing targeting and strike capabilities.

The document calls for commando forces to be early adopters of these types of technologies. SOCOM has been on the cutting-edge before as an early DOD user of the Maven Smart System, for example.

“The distinction between optimizing and generative AI is crucial and will be a game changer. Swarms of low-cost drones and remote explosive devices, using AI and autonomy, blur traditional human-machine boundaries on the battlefield. SOF must also use these systems to improve decisionmaking and situational awareness,” officials wrote in the strategy.

Vice Adm. Frank Bradley, the current commander of Joint Special Operations Command who’s been nominated by President Donald Trump to be head of SOCOM, said the use of innovative drone capabilities and tactics in places like Ukraine and the Middle East have ushered in a “revolution in military affairs.”

“The changing, accelerating pace of technology, the ubiquitous information environment, and the advent of man-machine teamed autonomy on the battlefields of the world today are absolutely changing the character of warfare … in our very eyes,” Bradley said last week during his confirmation hearing with the Senate Armed Services Committee.

He added that legislative proposals such as the FORGED Act and SPEED Act, and other initiatives to reform DOD acquisitions and speed up the fielding of new tech, are “critical to allowing us to use the innovative spirit of our operators to be able to capture those problems and opportunities we see on the battlefield and turn them into new man-machine teamed approaches.”

The amendment to the BAA comes just two weeks after the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced the award of $200 million contracts to multiple vendors for “frontier AI” projects.

“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” CDAO Doug Matty said in a statement accompanying that announcement. “Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems.”

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As vice president of AI-first transformation, Plumb will spearhead IBM’s Next-Generation Transformation Strategy and work across the company’s core business lines to foster adoption of AI, automation and hybrid cloud computing throughout the global organization and with its clients and partners.

Plumb started in the role July 14.

A key part of her job, Plumb told DefenseScoop, will be serving as IBM’s “Client Zero,” meaning she will internally operationalize AI technologies and concepts to test them before deploying to clients.

“The approach is really taking AI solutions and embedding them in the company’s own processes and then using that to prove out how AI solves problems, drives agility, creates efficiencies, which IBM then can use to help demonstrate that value for its customers, right? So, this is an internal transformation role, but with an eye towards building out concrete examples of execution for external consumption,” Plumb told DefenseScoop.

That’s not so dissimilar from her role leading the CDAO, which serves as a central hub for accelerating and spreading the adoption of AI, data and analytics capabilities across the U.S. military. She likened it to the work of CDAO’s Rapid Capabilities Cell, which has been responsible for ushering in major contracts with frontier AI models.

Likewise, IBM is very focused on “scaled adoption at the enterprise level,” Plumb said.

“So how can you get AI tools into the hands of your workforce, and do it in a way that, rather than AI as a substitute for all the humans, you team AI with the humans to drive efficiency and productivity?” she said.

Plumb explained: “IBM’s big bet is … how can we do this as an enterprise transformation and really kind of drive the AI transformation vision in concrete ways through businesses.”

In particular, she sees an opportunity for IBM in working with her former employer, the Pentagon, and the federal government at large on the business side with applications, for example, managing supply chains, logistics, contracting and more.

“That’s where I think there’s a lot of potential for rapid movement of things we find that work in IBM and applications to the federal sector,” Plumb said.

Since Plumb’s departure from the CDAO in January, the office was led by Margie Palmieri, the deputy CDAO, until DOD leadership named Douglas Matty as the new leader in April. Matty previously founded the Army AI Integration Center under Army Futures Command, which he led between 2020 and 2022. Last week, DefenseScoop reported that Palmieri, one of the CDAO’s longest-tenured leaders, is the latest to depart the organization amid a raft of others who’ve left.

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“This draft solicitation has been canceled as the Advancing Artificial Intelligence Multiple Award Contract (AAMAC) program is currently on hold,” officials wrote in the contracting document published Wednesday.

Advana is a mash-up of two words: advancing analytics. It refers to a complex data warehouse and platform that supplies the military, defense officials and their approved partners with decision-support analytics, visualizations and data-driven tools. 

Advana’s origin traces back to DOD’s chief financial officer’s unit, when staff needed to pull data from thousands of disparate business systems that were not interoperable at the time. 

In 2021, Booz Allen Hamilton won a five-year, $647 million contract to expand the program. Shortly after that, Advana’s management and oversight was one of the main Pentagon elements transitioned to underpin the CDAO when that office launched and became operational in 2022, during the Biden administration.

In the fall of 2024, senior Defense Department officials unveiled aims to potentially award follow-on contracts — and ultimately fund up to $15 billion to a diverse range of companies over the next 10 years. The draft request for proposals to inform the DOD’s potential development of an AAMAC solicitation was released in November.

Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, the near-term vision for the CDAO’s path ahead — as well as Advana’s — has not been revealed. There’s also been an exodus of senior staff from the office, including some who will not be replaced as newly installed defense leaders prioritize President Donald Trump’s demands for cuts and efficiency. 

In response to questions about the reason for the solicitation cancellation, the AAMAC hold, and the plan for the platform moving forward, a defense official told DefenseScoop: “Advana continues to mature technically and programatically. It serves as a foundational enterprise capability. The department will initiate activities in the coming months to leverage best of industry support to meet department requirements.”

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“After more than three years as the inaugural Principal Deputy of the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, Ms. Margaret Palmieri will be departing the organization in August. We are immensely grateful for the incredible groundwork she laid while standing up the CDAO,” a defense official told DefenseScoop on Monday.

Four predecessor organizations — the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Defense Digital Service, Office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Advana program — were fused together to form the CDAO, which was announced in late 2021 and reached full operating capability in 2022.

One of the earliest CDAO employees, Palmieri was tapped to serve as its first-ever deputy chief in early 2022, soon after the office was announced. Before that, she spent more than a decade in the Office of Naval Operations where she led a number of technology-driving initiatives, including setting up and leading the Navy Digital Warfare Office.

At the CDAO, she helped steer the Pentagon’s AI and machine learning strategy, development and policy formulation and create the foundation for departmentwide digital infrastructure and services to support military and civilian components’ algorithmic-enabled asset deployments. Palmieri also led the CDAO in an acting capacity multiple times during her tenure, including most recently during the transition into the second Trump administration.

Her planned departure marks the latest in an exodus of senior leaders and other technical employees from the CDAO in recent months, and comes as the office’s new leadership has yet to publicly reveal its vision for the future. 

DefenseScoop has contacted Pentagon spokespersons regarding whether a new deputy has been selected to replace the deputy CDAO in a permanent or acting capacity.

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Anthropic, Google and xAI will join OpenAI on the CDAO’s nascent effort to partner with industry on pioneering artificial intelligence projects focused on national security applications. Under the individual contracts — each worth up to $200 million — the Pentagon will have access to some of the most advanced AI capabilities developed by the four companies, including large language models, agentic AI workflows, cloud-based infrastructure and more.

“The adoption of AI is transforming the Department’s ability to support our warfighters and maintain strategic advantage over our adversaries,” Chief Digital and AI Officer Doug Matty said in a statement. “Leveraging commercially available solutions into an integrated capabilities approach will accelerate the use of advanced AI as part of our Joint mission essential tasks in our warfighting domain as well as intelligence, business, and enterprise information systems.”

OpenAI received the first contract for the effort June 17 and will create prototypes of agentic workflows for national security missions. According to CDAO, work with all four vendors will expand the Pentagon’s experience with emerging AI capabilities, as well as give the companies better insights into how their technology can benefit the department.

The contract with CDAO is also another win for xAI, which is owned by Musk — who previously led the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) efforts but recently had a falling out with President Donald Trump over legislation and other issues — and develops the generative AI tool called Grok. The company announced Monday that it was launching a new suite of AI tools for U.S. government users known as “Grok for Government.” The platform is now available to purchase by federal agencies through the General Services Administration, according to a post on X, which Musk also owns.

In a blog post published Monday, Jim Kelly, Google Public Sector’s vice president of federal sales, noted that the company will provide the Pentagon its Cloud Tensor Processing Units for training AI models, AI-powered agents via Google’s Agentspace, and access to the company’s infrastructure based in the contiguous United States.

“These advanced AI solutions will enable the DoD to effectively address defense challenges and scale the adoption of agentic AI across enterprise systems to drive innovation and efficiency with agile, proven technology,” Kelly wrote.

The announcement is the latest step the Defense Department has taken in recent months to accelerate adoption of AI-enabled capabilities developed by commercial companies — many of which have recently announced new business ventures focused on national security.

In June, Anthropic introduced a custom set of its Claude Gov AI models that are tailored specifically to defense use cases, ranging from operational planning to intelligence analysis. The same month, OpenAI launched a new initiative called “OpenAI for Government” that expands on its current partnerships with the Defense Department and other U.S. government agencies — including custom AI models for national security.

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Details on the decision are sparse in the documents, but officials wrote that the Chief Digital and AI Office’s CTO “no longer exists or manages resources.” 

President Donald Trump directed federal agencies at the start of his second term to drastically reduce their workforces and assess existing contracts, with aims to ultimately cut back on what his team views as wasteful spending and inefficiencies. The efforts have included initiatives overseen by Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, teams.

While AI is a major priority for the U.S. government under Trump, since then, the Pentagon’s CDAO has seen an exodus of senior leaders and other technical employees.

“As part of broader DOD efficiency efforts, CDAO realized organization efficiencies in FY26, including eliminating the CTO directorate,” a CDAO official told DefenseScoop on Wednesday. “This move has minimal mission impact as CDAO has a strong technical workforce embedded within each of its directorates.”

Budget materials show that the directorate was allocated more than $340 million in fiscal 2024.

The CDAO official declined to share more information regarding how the CTO’s employees, responsibilities and investments were dispersed following the elimination.

Shortly after standing up the CDAO in June 2022, Defense Department leadership hired nearly a dozen senior leaders to serve in its top positions — including Bill Streilein as inaugural CTO. Streilein had previously served as a longtime leader at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory and is now back at the lab working as a member of its principal staff.

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In its daily list of new contract awards, the department announced Monday evening that the CDAO had awarded a $200 million prototype other transaction agreement to OpenAI Public Sector to “develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains.”

The estimated completion date for the work is July 2026.

The announcement did not provide any additional details about what those capabilities will entail or what specific mission sets they’ll be applied to.

Last year, the CDAO listed a variety of “warfighting” use cases that its newly launched Artificial Intelligence Rapid Capabilities Cell would focus on, including command and control, decision support, operational planning, logistics, weapons development and testing, uncrewed and autonomous systems, intelligence activities, information operations and cyber operations.

“Enterprise management” use cases include financial systems, human resources, enterprise logistics and supply chain, health care information management, legal analysis and compliance, procurement processes, and software development and cybersecurity.

On Tuesday, DefenseScoop sent the CDAO questions seeking more information about the deal with OpenAI.

In a statement, a CDAO official said the vendor will be expected to “prototype agentic workflows to address our hardest challenges.”

The official, who provided comment on the condition of anonymity, added that more announcements are expected in the near term.

“This award is another step on our journey toward accelerating the adoption of advanced AI capabilities across the Department, and, in the coming weeks, we will announce partnerships with other Frontier AI companies as well. Access to top tier talent from partners like OpenAI is critical for building the agentic workflows needed to increase Joint Force lethality and enterprise efficiencies,” they said.

They noted that the CDAO has recently partnered with the Army’s Enterprise Large Language Model (LLM) Workspace to provide military users across the combatant commands, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the Joint Staff access to “industry-leading general purpose LLMs.”

In an press release Monday evening announcing the launch of a new “OpenAI for Government” initiative, the company noted the new $200 million deal with the CDAO, saying the organization will help the Pentagon “identify and prototype how frontier AI can transform its administrative operations, from improving how service members and their families get health care, to streamlining how they look at program and acquisition data, to supporting proactive cyber defense.”

More broadly, the company said the OpenAI for Government initiative will give customers access to its “most capable” models within “secure and compliant environments,” including through ChatGPT Enterprise and ChatGPT Gov.

It will also offer custom models for national security organizations on a limited basis, per the announcement.

Katrina Mulligan, the head of the company’s national security policy and partnerships who previously served as chief of staff to the secretary of the Army and principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, told DefenseScoop that the new project with the CDAO marks a major milestone for OpenAI for Government as it moves to expand its work in the public sector.

“The $200 million ceiling reflects the Department’s trust in OpenAI to responsibly bring frontier AI into mission-critical settings. CDAO is also creating a framework for how OpenAI’s leading expertise can be used to develop and test solutions that support the Department of Defense in its mission to ensure the safety and security of Americans,” she wrote.

An OpenAI spokesperson said the goal of the pilot program is to “scope” and prototype potential applications for frontier AI.

“The contract aims to explore where OpenAI’s tools can improve military operations and cybersecurity, save time for staff by making tedious work more efficient, and help DoD better support service members. DoD requires this type of contract to scope future partnerships, and the project is structured to lead into a potential follow-on production agreement. The applications may take different functions and forms that are yet to be determined – but could include all of our services,” they told DefenseScoop, adding that all use cases must be consistent with the company’s usage policies and guidelines, which “prohibit its use for the development or use of weapons.”

The announcement of the $200 million deal came just a few days after OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil joined the Army Reserve to serve in Detachment 201, a new “Executive Innovation Corps,” along with other execs from the tech community.

Mikayla Easley contributed reporting for this story.

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The move comes as the Pentagon is pumping billions of dollars into cloud and AI programs with plans to spend more in the coming years to boost its digital modernization and give new tools to warfighters and back-office workers.

The Protecting AI and Cloud Competition in Defense Act of 2025 was reintroduced in the Senate by Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., and introduced in the House by Reps. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., Pat Fallon, R-Texas, and Chris Deluzio, D-Pa., according to a press release issued Thursday by Warren’s office.

Warren and Schmitt are members of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Jacobs, Fallon and Deluzio are members of the House Armed Services Committee.

The bill “would ensure that DoD’s new contracts protect competition in the AI and cloud computing markets, instead of giving an unfair advantage to a few big players,” per the release.

If enacted, the Pentagon would be required to have a competitive award process for each procurement of cloud computing, data infrastructure and foundation model solutions when contracting with vendors that have entered into contracts totaling $50 million or more with the department in any of the five previous fiscal years.

Additionally, it directs department leaders to pursue modular open systems approaches, mitigate barriers to entry faced by small businesses and nontraditional contractors, and prioritize multi-cloud technology “unless doing so is infeasible or presents a substantial danger to national security.”

The Pentagon would also have to keep lawmakers updated.

“Not later than January 15, 25 2027, and annually thereafter for four years, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in coordination with the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, shall submit to the congressional defense committees a report assessing the competition, innovation, barriers to entry, and concentrations of market power or market share in the AI space for each period covered by the report … The report shall also include recommendations of appropriate legislative and administrative action,” the bill states.

Lawmakers also aim to protect data.

The legislation calls for the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) to update or promulgate provisions of the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement to ensure that government-furnished data “provided for purposes of development and operation of AI products and services to the Department of Defense, is not disclosed or used without proper authorization” — and that such data “cannot be used to train or improve the functionality of commercial products offered by a covered provider without express authorization by the Department of Defense.”

Government-furnished data stored on vendor systems “for purposes of development and operation of AI products and services” must also be “appropriately protected from other data on such systems.”

Violation of these provisions would be subject to penalties, including fines and contract termination.

However, the legislation allows for DOD component acquisition executives to issue exemptions if they determine that doing so is “necessary for national security.” The acquisition execs would be required to notify the CDAO about each exemption and provide a justification for the move.

“It’s a mistake to let Silicon Valley monopolize our AI and cloud computing tools because it doesn’t just stifle innovation, it increases costs and threatens our national security,” Warren said in a statement. “Our bill will make sure the military can access cutting-edge tools and will keep our markets strong and our information secure.”

In the press release from Warren’s office, Schmitt warned against “allowing a select group of companies to dominate the awards process,” adding that the Defense Department should adopt policies that create opportunities for emerging AI defense companies.

Jacobs said in a statement that competition “always pushes the limits of creativity, innovation, and excellence – whether in AI or any other field. That’s why the Department of Defense needs to prioritize competition in its AI and cloud computing contracts to ensure we deploy the best technologies to protect and strengthen our national security.”

Deluzio added that enacting the legislation would help “protect data and public money from the failures of concentrated power” and “promote real competition” in the defense tech sector.

“By relying on free market principles, the Department of Defense can help ensure competition and innovation when it comes to the bidding process for government AI and cloud contracts,” Fallon stated in the release. “Due to the varied cyber threats facing our nation today, we must also ensure that AI and cloud related data is secure when it is held exclusively by the federal government. For these reasons, the Protecting AI and Cloud Competition in Defense Act is the next step forward Congress must take in the interest of US national security.”

Warren and Schmitt introduced similar legislation in December during the previous session of Congress, but it was never enacted.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is looking to bring more companies into the fold for AI, cloud and other digital capabilities.

“Competition in the marketplace enables the government to acquire the best solutions at lower cost to the taxpayer. As agencies seek to accelerate the adoption of AI-enabled services, they must pay careful attention to vendor sourcing, data portability, and long-term interoperability to avoid significant and costly dependencies on a single vendor,” White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought wrote to department and agency heads in an April memo.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth issued a memo in March directing all Defense Department components to embrace a rapid software acquisition pathway and use commercial solutions openings and other transaction authority to speed up the procurement of digital tools for warfighters.

“When we take that software pathway mechanism and we combine it with innovation that [the Defense Innovation Unit] has been working in commercial solutions openings, or CSOs, and other transaction authorities, OTAs, we get to the point where now we can expose the programs, the software programs, to nontraditional and commercial software developers, while we simultaneously … lower the barrier for those nontraditional and commercial software developers to get into defense programs of record,” a senior defense official told reporters during a background briefing in March regarding Hegseth’s directive.

The Office of the DOD Chief Information Officer recently released an updated software modernization implementation plan. The first goal outlined in the document is to accelerate and scale the Pentagon’s enterprise cloud environment.

At AFCEA’s TechNet Cyber conference last week, Rob Vietmeyer, chief software officer for the deputy CIO for information enterprise, said the contract vehicle for the $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability program — under which Google, Oracle, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have been competing for task orders — was “suboptimal” for large acquisitions. Officials in the CIO’s office are currently planning for JWCC 2.0, a follow-on phase that aims to add more vendors and different contracting mechanisms to the program.

The DOD has a variety of cloud efforts beyond JWCC. The software modernization implementation plan also calls for the establishment of additional contract options for cloud innovation geared towards smaller vendors and “niche providers.“

“In the implementation plan, we’re trying to build that next-generation cloud infrastructure and extend it. Not just looking at JWCC, but we’re also looking at how we extend for small business cloud providers,” Vietmeyer said.

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“This progress moves us closer to bi-directional, real-time data flow between the tactical edge and operational and strategic decision-makers,” CDAO officials wrote.

In response to questions about the document’s contents, a defense official confirmed on Wednesday that the office, in partnership with the joint force, recently closed out the thirteenth iteration of its Global Information Dominance Experiment (GIDE) series, which unfolded in conjunction with the Army’s Project Convergence Capstone 5 (PC-C5) event.

GIDE is rooted in the Defense Department’s aims to get new technologies and equipment into the hands of warfighters for iterative testing and refinement through distributed, digital experiments, sprints and military service-led exercises like PC-C5.

Early versions of the GIDE series launched in 2020 and were facilitated by U.S. Northern Command. But in 2022, Pentagon leadership under the Biden administration tasked the CDAO with revamping the effort to strategically enable capabilities that could help realize the U.S. military’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control warfighting construct. 

Since then, GIDE experiments have generally run approximately every 90 days.

In the CDAO document summarizing multiple takeaways from GIDE 13, officials wrote that PC-C5 “served as the first major exercise venue to demonstrate” the EDM line of effort, which the office awarded a production other transaction agreement for in fall 2024.

“EDM is a government-owned technology stack that enables tactical-level data distribution in disadvantaged, disconnected, intermittent and limited — or DDIL — communications environments through a resilient nodal architecture,” they wrote.

A defense official told DefenseScoop that the CDAO is deploying EDM nodes to tactical users and other key locations to ultimately assess the fusion of operational and tactical data and C2 capabilities.

In the EDM context, nodes essentially refer to physical points within the network that are typically near end users or information sources, where data is captured, processed, or stored. This allows for distributed, decentralized data transmission that could underpin future edge computing missions.

“Edge Data Mesh enables data integration and exchange across multiple networks and data formats, including in denied and degraded communications environments,” the defense official said.

“Core to this effort is the commitment to interoperability using Open DAGIR principles and deployed architectures. The government-owned software development kit allows rapid integration of mature and emerging systems and applications with the EDM architecture,” they added. 

Project Convergence is an Army-led experimentation venue that enables personnel from across the U.S. military services and key allies to train together and collaboratively work out various concepts for integration. Army officials have been transparent about their aims to see new capabilities stay with commands for continued use after Capstone 5. 

In the CDAO document, officials stated that the “Scenario B” portion of PC-C5 provided participants with “a critical opportunity to test and develop EDM interoperability with other mission command platforms in field conditions — which remained behind following the exercise’s completion and will continue to provide resilient tactical data transport in the [area of responsibility].”

Activities associated with that scenario were conducted in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command area of responsibility. They involved tech experiments with all of the service components at the combatant command level.

“We continue to demonstrate that one of the most effective ways to advance modern [command and control, or C2] capability is to exercise and experiment how we fight — on live networks, with live data, with daily users — and leaving behind capability after every exercise,” CDAO officials wrote.

Some of the other “wins” from GIDE 13 listed in the document include demonstrating the integration of third-party software into DOD’s data infrastructure, and integrating multiple third-party generative AI capabilities into existing operational contexts. 

“This significantly accelerates warfighters’ ability to process complex information, especially across maneuver, intelligence, fires, and logistics workflows, shortening decision-loops and ensuring we achieve decision advantage,” the document states.

The defense official did not answer DefenseScoop’s questions regarding the makers and use cases of those genAI assets that were tested in the GIDE 13 and PC-C5 experiments last month.

“GIDE events have incorporated GenAI capabilities supporting a variety of workflows. These capabilities are a subset of GIDE’s mission command software suite, supporting [combatant commands] outside GIDE experimentation, so operators can continue to refine how they use them without waiting for the next experiment,” the defense official said.

They confirmed that GIDE 14 will take place during the upcoming iteration of Pacific Sentry and “Joint Exercise SoCal in Indo-Pacom.”

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“At a time when [Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth] wants to prioritize the use of AI to modernize the Defense Department, it’s more important than ever to have a highly effective and motivated CDAO team,” a source said Wednesday.

The CDAO achieved full operational capability in 2022 — under the Biden administration — after merging four technology-focused organizations at the Pentagon: the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC), Defense Digital Service (DDS), Office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Advana program.

Commercial tech executive Craig Martell initially led the office from its inception until his resignation in early 2024. Defense acquisition expert Radha Plumb served as the second permanent CDAO from April of that year to January 2025. 

Last month, Douglas Matty became the first official to steer the CDAO on a permanent basis under the new Trump administration.

He’s taking the helm as the office is involved in a variety of DOD-wide initiatives that seek to accelerate data analytics, automation, computer vision, machine learning and next-generation AI capabilities for military and civilian personnel — all of which align with the Trump team’s priorities.

Matty’s tenure begins at a time when questions about the defense AI hub’s next chapter continue to swirl. Several officials suggested that government leaders are exploring plans to consolidate CDAO with other DOD organizations, including the Defense Innovation Unit. Simultaneously, the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) team is promoting disruptive initiatives to cut what they consider wasteful spending and drastically reduce the size of the U.S. federal workforce.

Officials who DefenseScoop connected with in separate conversations this week said that over the last few months — both before and after Matty came onboard — a noticeable number of key employees have exited or announced plans to leave their positions in the near term. 

Social media posts and public reports have also reflected those recent departures of experienced CDAO officials in high-stakes positions, including former deputy for mission analytics, Garrett Berntsen; former acting deputy for acquisitions and assurance, Bonnie Evangelista; former deputy for advanced C2 acceleration, Jock Padgett; former Global Information Dominance Experiments lead, Matt Strohmeyer; as well as Defense Digital Service director Jennifer Hay and her team.

Replacements for those positions, as well as the office’s algorithmic warfare chief and Advana platform lead have not been named publicly, and leadership roles listed on the CDAO’s official website continue to dwindle.

“The organization is clearly in crisis, with a continued stream of leaders and technical staff departing either through the Trump administration’s workforce reduction efforts, or simply by choice,” one official told DefenseScoop.

They and other sources also said that, over the last week or so, DOGE officials have called current and former staff asking for direct feedback on CDAO leadership, culture and organizational challenges.

A spokesperson for the office did not provide comments by press time on the alleged exodus, or disclose the number of CDAO officials who have opted into the Trump administration’s various accelerated departure options for DOD civilian employees.

“CDAO fully supports the department’s efforts to identify efficiencies while improving our ability to deliver lethality for our warfighters. While we don’t comment on individuals leveraging existing and recently initiated human resource initiatives, many of the personnel actions are aligned to continuous improvements that align human capital to organizational functions. Additionally, these transitions illustrate the high quality of individuals that have added value in government service and continue to have opportunities in the private sector,” a defense official said Wednesday. 

“CDAO continues to execute its mission and process Deferred Resignation Program requests. The department approved approximately 22,000 employees to participate in the OPM DRP (Round 1). The DOD offered its own DRP (Round 2) from April 7 through April 14, 2025, and the department is still collecting and evaluating that data,” they also told DefenseScoop.

Matty is set to testify Thursday on Capitol Hill at a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing on the Pentagon’s current IT and AI posture.

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