# The New Great Game

By [DYLIT Chronicles](https://dylit.info/user/dylitmediabuzz)

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Pentagon Wants AI-Generated "People" to Mask Military Cellphone Signals What's Being Reported The Pentagon wants technology that floods cellphone networks with AI-generated "people," meant to confuse anyone trying to track real military personnel through their phones. Using fake radio signals to spoof the enemy is a common stratagem, and the Department of Defense wants to take that idea one step further by wielding AI-generated "personalities" to mimic real people and fool enemy AI trying to identify patterns in friendly cellphone traffic. The Department of Defense Small Business Innovation Research solicitation was first reported by Military Times on September 4, 2026. The specs call for AI-powered personas broadcast simultaneously from each decoy device, with a threshold of two and an objective of four or more. This is separate from, though related to, a more widely covered 2024 effort by the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) to build deepfake social media personas, first reported by The Intercept. The Technology Behind the Claim "Digital exhaust" is the metadata phones constantly emit, things like location, device identifiers, and network connections. Intelligence agencies, police, and criminal groups already mine this data to reconstruct someone's routine or locate sensitive facilities. The solicitation describes a "digital exhaust deception system" built around decoy hardware, including Wi-Fi router sized team devices and puck sized personal devices, meant to generate patterns of life realistic enough to survive automated scrutiny. That's distinct from the earlier JSOC program, which sought StyleGAN style deepfake photos, video, and voice to build convincing fake social media accounts rather than phone signal decoys. Both rely on generative AI, but for different jobs: one obscures real radio traffic, the other fabricates online identities. What's Actually Confirmed Two things check out. The JSOC procurement listing is a real document, a 76-page "wish list" obtained and published by The Intercept in October 2024, seeking tools to build online personas that appear human but don't exist. Separately, the cellphone-decoy solicitation is a genuine, publicly posted DoD funding opportunity opening September 23 and closing October 21, 2026, with stated requirements on persona count, device weight, and battery life. What isn't confirmed: whether either program has moved past the request-for-proposals stage, how either would actually function in the field, or that the explicit goal is "deceiving enemy spies" in a literal sense, rather than defeating automated traffic analysis and metadata tracking, which is the language the solicitation itself uses. Concerns Raised by Experts Researchers point to a contradiction: the same government that has repeatedly warned about foreign deepfakes is now pursuing similar technology itself. Georgetown's Daniel Byman told The Intercept the effort risks making the US look hypocritical and could weaken domestic trust in official information. Heidy Khlaaf of the AI Now Institute argued that deepfake personas serve no purpose beyond deception, and warned that US military use could normalize the tactic for adversaries like Russia and China. Legal questions remain publicly unresolved, including whether such systems could amount to fraud if third parties are deceived, how they square with international norms on deception in intelligence operations, and what happens if an AI decoy gets mistaken for a real person by a civilian or a journalist. Why This Matters Neither program is confirmed as deployed. Both are procurement efforts, requests for companies to build capabilities the Pentagon says it wants, not proof the systems already exist or are in active use. That distinction matters when weighing viral claims about "AI armies" flooding networks. Still, the broader pattern, a military simultaneously pursuing fake phone signals and fake online identities, suggests AI-driven deception is becoming a standard tool of modern statecraft rather than a hypothetical one. As the SBIR window closes in late October, more technical detail could surface, but the operational picture stays speculative for now. Sources https://www.militarytimes.com/industry/techwatch/2026/09/04/pentagon-wants-to-use-ai-generated-personalities-for-decoy-cellphones/ https://theintercept.com/2024/10/17/pentagon-ai-deepfake-internet-users/