Have you ever thought, hey, wouldn’t it be great if special ops could use ChatGPT for everything like the rest of us? Well, now they can—sort of. Yesterday, US Special Operations Command announced that they’ve adopted an enterprise-wide generative AI platform called SOFchat, built by a company called Legion Intelligence. The initial contract with Legion is good for three years and worth up to $16M.
Welcome to 2025, USSOCOM.
Smarty pants: In case you fell asleep in 2020 and just woke up, generative AI can be pretty helpful—hallucinations aside, they can help speed up everything from analysis, to research, to tasks like resource management and planning.
That applies to the government and military as well—across the defense industry and the DoD, companies have tried to build models that can help with everything from mission planning, to logistics, to intelligence monitoring and analysis. OpenAI itself has introduced a model tailor-made to help navigate through the slog of government called ChatGPT Gov.
SOFChat aims to introduce this kind of automation to SOCOM. The Legion-built platform allows users to:
- Access and search a cloud of organizational docs and data
- Chat with a bot and ask questions about that “organizational knowledge”
- Generate written content—emails, reports, and the like—using the org’s knowledge
- Automate workflows and reduce annoying administrative tasks.
The organization can also build on top of Legion to make it meet specific requirements or perform new tasks, according to the company.
On the IL: But here’s the tricky bit: In an organization like SOCOM, it’s ultra-critical to make sure that the platform isn’t leaking classified information—or revealing that information to users with inadequate clearance.
Here’s how Legion says it keeps things nice and tight:
- SOFchat can be deployed across a range of environments—on-premises, air‑gapped, cloud, and even secret networks.
- The company’s platform is proprietary, meaning it was built specifically for this kind of secure environment.
- SOFchat is integrated with Palantir’s Apollo Mission Manager, which helps the government securely onboard software providers.
- The company uses a range of security controls, including encryption, audit logging, and super-strict access controls to make sure that data never crosses between classification levels.
- The platform has strict guardrails in place that keep it from hallucinating. Good to know, especially when you know the kind of missions SOCOM deals with.
Legion is used by the DoD and DoE, and is certified at classification levels DoD Impact Levels 2-6 (IL2-6). Fun fact: It was the first Gen AI platform to be certified for use at IL6 (that’s “secret”.)
Wonder how effective all of those security measures are against strike plans being shared on Signal.