Executives from OpenAI, Meta, and Palantir Join U.S. Army
June 24th, 2025Via: Business Insider:
Four top tech execs from OpenAI, Meta, and Palantir have just joined the US Army — no obstacle courses, shouted orders, or grueling marches required.
The Army Reserve has commissioned these senior tech leaders to serve as midlevel officers, skipping tradition to pursue transformation. The newcomers won’t attend any current version of the military’s most basic and ingrained rite of passage— boot camp.
Instead, they’ll be ushered in through express training that Army leaders are still hashing out, Col. Dave Butler, a spokesman for the chief of staff of the Army, said in a phone interview with Business Insider.
“They’ll do marksmanship training, physical training, they’ll learn the Army rank structure and history, and uniforms,” Butler explained. He said that “you could think of it as a pilot” of the boot-camp-lite plans, adding that the new soldiers were a part of the Army’s larger effort to rapidly modernize.
The execs — Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, the chief technology officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, the chief product officer at OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, an advisor at Thinking Machines Lab who was formerly the chief research officer for OpenAI — are joining the Army as lieutenant colonels as part of an effort to turbocharge tech innovation and adoption, according to an Army press statement.
The service’s decision to allow the four to skip “direct commissioning” boot camp, a shortened version of regular officer boot camp, is unusual, though not without historical precedence, Butler said.
“The Army has allowed the direct commission of civilians since 1861 to bring experts with critically needed skills into the force,” he wrote in an email to BI.
