In a memorandum dated June 27, 2018, Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan ordered the establishment of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) within the US Department of Defense. The center was placed under the Department’s Chief Information Officer and was charged with coordinating artificial intelligence efforts across the military services and defense agencies.
The JAIC’s mandate was to set common AI standards, tools, shared data, and processes for the whole department, and to run what it called National Mission Initiatives, large-scale projects applying AI to clusters of related problems such as predictive maintenance and humanitarian assistance. The establishing memo directed the JAIC to coordinate defense AI projects above a $15 million annual threshold.
The center was created at a moment of intense debate inside the technology industry over military AI, the same period in which Google employees protested the company’s involvement in the Pentagon’s Project Maven. The JAIC represented the department’s attempt to centralize and accelerate AI adoption rather than leaving it scattered across individual programs.
The JAIC operated as the focal point for defense AI until 2022, when its functions were folded into a new and larger office, the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer. Its founding marked the point at which the US military treated artificial intelligence as a department-wide priority requiring dedicated institutional leadership.