The Department of War announced an Artificial Intelligence Acceleration Strategy on January 9, 2026, directing the department to develop AI agents for battle management and decision support, mandate federated data access for AI systems, and require that the latest commercial AI models be made available within 30 days of public release. By April 2026, DoW personnel had used GenAI.mil's Agent Designer tool to build over 100,000 agents for unclassified administrative tasks, while the strategy's Agent Network initiative continues to direct AI agent development for battle management and decision support.

The January 9, 2026 strategy memo directs the CDAO to oversee seven Pace-Setting Projects (PSPs) spanning warfighting, intelligence, and enterprise mission areas. One PSP, called Agent Network, directs AI agent development and experimentation for battle management and decision support, from campaign planning through targeting. The memo requires all military departments to deliver federated data catalogs to the CDAO within 30 days and mandates that AI model contracts include the latest model versions within 30 days of public release. The AI Rapid Capabilities Cell (AI RCC), formed in December 2024 with $100 million in FY2024-2025 funding and run jointly by the CDAO and the Defense Innovation Unit, is executing frontier AI pilots across warfighting and enterprise use cases. Separately, by April 2026 DoW personnel had built over 100,000 agents on GenAI.mil using a no-/low-code Agent Designer tool for unclassified administrative tasks such as drafting documents and summarizing meetings; the platform had more than 1.2 million discrete users as of that date.