Microsoft’s ‘air gapped’ AI is a bot specifically designed to handle highly classified information

William Chappell, CTO of Microsoft’s Strategic Missions and Technology, said that the company has set up a GPT-4 large language model on a government-only network that is separate from the rest of the internet and doesn’t connect to it. An unnamed executive told Bloomberg first about the setup. They said that the Azure Government Top Secret cloud-hosted model is the first time a “major” LLM has worked without being connected to the internet.

Chappell talked about the AI supercomputer at the “first-ever AI Expo for National Competitiveness” in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday afternoon. Microsoft says this server is “static,” which means it doesn’t learn from the files it processes or the internet as a whole like ChatGPT or other tools do.

He told Bloomberg, “It has been deployed, it’s live, it’s answering questions, and it will write code as an example of what it can do.” And Chappell told DefenseScoop that it hasn’t been approved for top-secret use yet. This means that the Pentagon and other government departments aren’t actually using it yet, whether it’s for HR tasks or processing data for a specific mission.