Washington-based EdgeRunner AI is offering a ChatGPT-like solution that runs entirely offline, built for secure, mission-critical use in sensitive military environments.
The system can generate mission plans, safety reports, and support requests, saving hours or even days of work while enabling role-specific assistance to commanders and troops.
Tyler Saltsman, the company’s CEO and a former US Army logistician, emphasized the platform’s open-source transparency and military-grade functionality in an interview with FOX Business.
“You can see the guts of the models,” he said, contrasting EdgeRunner’s approach with the closed-source architecture behind most commercial AI products.
He added that the tech can run directly on military gear such as laptops, mobile devices, and battery packs, with no data center required.
According to Saltsman, the model was trained on more than 30 billion words drawn from military doctrine, global security history, tactics, training field manuals, philosophy, and other “ideologies that shaped Western civilization.”
“What we’ve done at EdgeRunner is we’ve taken these models, these [large language models], we’ve compressed them, and we fine-tune them on military data,” the veteran told the outlet.
“So now, they’re so small that they can live on a chip, and they don’t require big data center servers to host them.”
Big AI Not Combat Ready
Saltsman’s interview followed news that OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Elon Musk’s xAI each landed a $200 million contract to aid the US Department of Defense in developing AI for national security.
Their platforms — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Grok — rely on massive internet-trained language models hosted in the cloud, drawing from sources like Wikipedia, news articles, books, and user conversations.
Saltsman raised concerns about the proprietary nature of these systems and their dependence on cloud infrastructure, warning that internet-based responses risk interception, tracking, and hacking.
“The problem with ChatGPT and frontier models like Anthropic and Grok, they’re too generalized, and they’re not specific to military expertise,” he stated.
“What we’re doing is we’re starting from the ground up and crafting these models to think like a military expert. More importantly, that captures our culture as an American warfighter because we’re very different from the rest of NATO.”
EdgeRunner’s AI tech is currently deployed overseas with the US Special Operations Command, with Saltsman noting, “They were happy with the fact that it never needs internet connectivity.”
The US Air Force Research Laboratory has also partnered with the company to test a generative chatbot on the military’s nonclassified internal network.
