General Major Jürgen Setzer, deputy inspector of the Cyber and Information Space and chief security officer of the German Armed Forces’ Cyber and Information Space command in Bonn, says the Bundeswehr will not use AI models from the United States. “We want to develop our own independence. At the moment we are evaluating models offered by German and European manufacturers for this application” Setzer told Handelsblatt.
In the United States, the use of AI is currently a hot debate. The Pentagon recently excluded models from US provider Anthropic and intends to replace them with those from OpenAI.
The German armed forces are still far from that stage. Setzer explained that the first step is to build a data‑integration platform and analysis tools. When asked about a timeline for deploying AI, the general replied, “We aim to be war‑ready by 2029, and we are working toward that goal”.