Army's unlimited AI tokens turn out to be finite

The Department of Defense had previously announced that nearly half of its 3.5 million employees were using AI. However, members of the Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) received an email informing them that they were burning through tokens and needed to limit usage. Although the Army CIO announced unlimited tokens in May 2026, the pool was exhausted by mid-June, forcing re-establishment of limits. It remains unclear if token usage will be renewed after October 1. The Army uses Ask Sage, a multimodal generative AI platform that runs large language models including Alphabet's Gemini, Meta's Llama, and OpenAI's ChatGPT. An anonymous Army employee stated that the entire Army burned through a year's worth of tokens for just one service. Ask Sage is used for tasks like reclassifying personnel descriptions and is accredited for Controlled Unclassified Information. Employees were initially given at least 200,000 tokens per month and could receive more automatically, with non-users encouraged to use their allocation.