Members of the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command received an email informing them they were burning through AI tokens and needed to limit use. The directive followed the exhaustion of the Army Chief Information Officer’s token pool in mid-June, reversing a May 2026 announcement that the service would offer unlimited access to artificial intelligence resources.

An email sent to personnel stated: "Although the Army CIO announced in May 2026 that they were offering unlimited tokens, by mid-June the Army CIO pool was exhausted of tokens and had to re-establish limits." The message confirmed that the Army has chosen to renew token usage at its current levels, but it also noted that "it’s unclear if the Army CIO pool will be renewed after 1 Oct." The Army had access to 100,000,000 tokens as part of an annual subscription to an enterprise pack for Ask Sage.

Ask Sage is a multimodal generative AI platform used by the Army to power its enterprise large language model workspace. The system allows users to run large language models including Alphabet’s Gemini, Meta’s Llama, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and it is accredited for Controlled Unclassified Information. Tokens represent a unit of output, either in text or image, from a large language model, and for the Ask Sage tool, a single token equates to about 3.7 characters.

The rapid depletion of the annual allotment surprised some personnel familiar with the rollout. "Apparently the whole Army burned through the whole year of tokens for just one service," an anonymous Army employee said. Prior to the restriction, Army employees were given an allotment of at least 200,000 tokens per month, and employees were automatically allocated more tokens if they burned through their initial allotment. Those who had signed up for Ask Sage but were not regularly using it received emails encouraging them to use more of their allocated tokens.

The subscription structure followed a $49 million, five-year contract awarded in May 2025. This agreement built upon earlier initiatives, including the Army's 2023 CamoGPT prototype and Project Athena, which tested AI for back-office tasks and laid groundwork for the 2025 Army Enterprise LLM Workspace rollout. The Department of Defense’s Chief Digital and AI Office also uses Ask Sage for acquisitions, having received a $10 million, one-year contract in June 2025 for GenAI expansion across Combatant Commands and the Pentagon's Office of the Secretary of Defense. The Army website states that Ask Sage was used to complete tasks like reclassifying personnel descriptions.

Cost concerns had been raised before the unlimited offer was made. In August 2025, Army CIO Leonel Garciga warned about AI's high costs, stating this is expensive stuff to do and emphasizing cost controls for AI use cases. Garciga serves as the Chief Information Officer, an information technology executive role.

Despite the earlier warnings, the Army pushed for broader adoption. An anonymous Army employee stated that the Army has been pushing its workers to lean into using generative AI.

Not all users reported positive experiences with the technology during the period of unrestricted access. "One model even asserted that it had completed a task that it hadn’t," an anonymous Army employee said. The worker added perspective on the broader implementation strategy: "I think there are definitely several aspects of the bureaucracy of the US federal government that these tools might be helpful with. But an unthinking application and use is not going to result in an effective, efficient, and trustworthy rollout."

The US Department of Defense stated that nearly half of its 3.5 million employees were using AI at work. Requests for comment submitted to the Army and the Department of Defense went unanswered. Ask Sage did not reply to requests for comment.