US Navy Claims AI Cut 160-Hour Job Down To 10 Minutes

Although a Stanford University study found that AI is destroying the market for young coders, the United States Navy has fully embraced the fast-evolving technology.  On December 9, Secretary of the Navy John Phelan announced that the branch would invest $448 million to continue developing the Shipbuilding Operating System (Ship OS); a Palantir Software AI tool meant to streamline the building and repair of ships. According to a Navy presa release, the system gathers data from existing sources to "identify bottlenecks, streamline engineering workflows, and support proactive risk mitigation." Dry runs of some tasks have already yielded impressive results; the Navy stated that "Portsmouth Naval Shipyard cut material review times from weeks to under one hour." 

General Dynamics' electric boat team used Ship OS for schedule planning; the process would have required 160 hours of manual labor but Ship OS knocked it out in under 10 minutes. The initial $448 million investment will be directed at submarine builders and their suppliers, and the Navy will use lessons learned from those projects to guide how Ship OS is rolled out on surface ships.

The U.S. Navy has employed plenty of AI technology in the recent past. AI-enhanced drones have been used by the Navy and Marines for years and in 2023 the Navy began using AI to detect Chinese submarines. It's no big secret, either. Some of the branch's top brass made public comments regarding AI use at the WEST conference in San Diego in January 2025. The Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association (AFCEA) reported via its Signal website that Vice Adm. Carl Chebi Naval Air Systems Commander Vice Admiral Carl Chebi mentioned that his teenaged daughter had just recently shown him how to use ChatGPT. 

"There's new technology coming down," he said, "and we've got a lot of folks who have thought about the problem in the same way for a long time. Help us think about the problem in a different way." Naval Information Warfare Systems Commander Rear Admiral Elizabeth "Seiko" Okano explained how the Navy's AI tool helped speed operations. "Essentially, on the ship, the sailors type in — it sucks in all the tech manuals and everything — and they type in a question, and it just answers it for them."