Army recruits officers from Meta, OpenAI and Palantir to serve in new detachment

Executives from high-tech firms Meta, OpenAI and Palantir are joining the Army Reserve at the rank of lieutenant colonel to serve in Detachment 201, a new “Executive Innovation Corps,” the service announced Friday.

The move is the latest push by the department to tap into capabilities and know-how from Silicon Valley and the commercial sector.

The new corps “brings top tech talent into the Army Reserve to bridge the commercial-military tech gap” and is “designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation,” the Army stated in a press release.

On Friday, the service is set to swear-in Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, OpenAI’s chief product officer Kevin Weil, Palantir’s CTO Shyam Sankar and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab who was previously OpenAI’s chief research officer.

Meta, which owns Facebook, recently announced a new partnership with defense tech company Anduril to develop extended reality (XR) products for soldiers.

OpenAI is the maker of the wildly popular generative AI tool ChatGPT. The Army and the Defense Department writ large are pursuing new genAI tools to boost productivity and efficiency.

Palantir is a major provider of software tools for the DOD — including the Maven Smart System — and is also developing hardware, such as the Army’s AI-enabled TITAN vehicle.

“Det. 201 is an effort to recruit senior tech executives to serve part-time in the Army Reserve as senior advisors. In this role they will work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems. By bringing private-sector know-how into uniform, Det. 201 is supercharging efforts like the Army Transformation Initiative, which aims to make the force leaner, smarter, and more lethal,” the service stated in Friday’s press release.

The swearing-in of the four new officers “is just the start of a bigger mission to inspire more tech pros to serve without leaving their careers, showing the next generation how to make a difference in uniform,” per the release.

The Army didn’t provide additional details about how large the detachment will grow to or how fast the service will expand it by bringing in new personnel from the tech sector.

Friday’s announcement comes in the midst of a new Army Transformation Initiative that was launched in recent weeks — which is being spearheaded by Secretary Daniel Driscoll and Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George — that calls for eliminating systems that are deemed obsolete for soldiers on the battlefield in the future and procuring “dual-use” capabilities. Driscoll has advocated for buying more commercial off-the-shelf tech, among other reforms.