Digital Twins, 'Passing the Buck', and The Logical Next Step in the Military Industrial Complex

The last time I wrote about the YouTuber Elodine, she had drawn two maps of how people argue about AI. This time she went to a military conference and came back angry. After watching her video twice, so am I.

What was said in Montgomery

DAFITC is the Department of the Air Force Information Technology and Cyberpower conference. The 2026 edition ran August 24 to 26 in Montgomery, Alabama. The local news station WSFA called it the 43rd annual event and said thousands of military, government, and technology people showed up. Elodine goes every year, she says, “to keep up on snake oil.”

On the Monday there was a fireside chat. One speaker was from OpenAI. Two were government officials. It ran about 30 minutes with no questions from the audience. The conference streamed it, and the clips in Elodine’s video come from that livestream, which she links. The OpenAI speaker was Alexis Bonnell. She was the Air Force Research Laboratory’s chief information officer until the spring of 2025, when she joined OpenAI. She now works for OpenAI for Government.

Four things were said on that stage, in this order. The recording does not label who is speaking. Where I say “one of the speakers,” that is all I know.

First, Bonnell described how heavy AI users feed the model their own lives. “If you looked at the average high, like, high AI user, like, my personalization page is about five pages long. Like, I say, this is who I am, this is what I want to achieve this year, this is, you know, the things I want to learn, etc.” Elodine’s reaction was that this was said to “a room full of hundreds of folks holding top secret clearances.” Many people at DAFITC are vendors, but her point stands. The pitch was five pages of personal detail, offered as the normal way to use the product.

Second, one of the speakers framed the first use of clones as training: “How we’re thinking of it as a first use case is for training, right? Because everybody learns differently, and so imagine if we put a digital clone of Ms. Devoto and all her knowledge, right? Or the CISO and all, you know, and you can interact with those folks, they’re digital clones, and say, well, how should I be thinking about this?” Ashley Devoto is the Department of the Air Force’s chief information officer, appointed in June 2026. A CISO is a chief information security officer, the person in charge of an organization’s cyber defense.

Digital clone: the speakers’ own word for a chatbot built from one real person’s knowledge, writing, and way of thinking, so you can “talk to” that person without them being there. Elodine calls it a digital twin, the engineering term for a software copy of a real thing that you test instead of the real thing. She notes that “digital twin” was not the wording used on stage.

Third, one of the speakers urged people to learn the advanced features now in their personal ChatGPT accounts, “because the reality is the advanced features are the same and work. So you can be learning all of these things and adding value, and when they become available, you become an expert from day one.” The speakers added that they were not telling anyone to work for free on their off hours. Elodine reads this as encouraging people to vibe code military applications at home, outside any controlled environment. I think that reading is fair, and I will come back to why.

Vibe coding: letting an AI write the program for you from a plain-English description, with little or no review of the code it produces.

Fourth, and this is the one that matters. One of the speakers said: “What my office is exploring right now is the use of a digital clone, right? And how will AI and that knowledge base that that person has, right, how would putting a digital clone on top of that really enhance and, you know, make sure that we’re able to be much more dynamic as leaders?”

To the speakers’ credit, one of them also said the quiet part: “What keeps me up at night, though, right, is the roles and responsibilities, right? We haven’t laid those roles and responsibilities flat yet when it comes to AI scale. So what I mean by that is, who’s responsible for the standards? Who’s responsible for providing the technology, right?”

Hold on to that. They know the responsibility question is open. They are exploring the clones anyway. And notice what kind of responsibility they named: standards and vendors. Not who answers for a decision made with a clone’s help.

Nobody on stage said what rights a person has to refuse. Nobody said whether any of this is already running. Elodine says she filed a Freedom of Information Act request, under the law that lets anyone ask for government records, for the talking points. I will update this post if she gets them.

What a “clone” actually is

I want to be plain about the technology, because the word “clone” does a lot of work.

Fine-tuning: training an existing AI model a little more on a specific set of data so it picks up that data’s style and facts.

A digital clone of a person is a pile of data about that person with a chatbot on top. It can be a long set of standing instructions to the model. It can be a model fine-tuned on their emails, memos, and meeting notes. It can be a search index of everything they ever wrote, with a model that reads from it and answers in their voice. I have built fine-tuned models for narrow jobs. They work. None of that makes the result a person. It makes it a snapshot, a picture of one person at one moment.

A snapshot has two problems that no amount of data fixes.

The first is time. People change. Elodine says she saw this for years while building character bots from interviews with real people. The same person, interviewed years apart, would say, “I really don’t agree with myself here, but I probably would have X number of years ago.” A clone of a general made in 2026 will still answer like 2026 in 2031, unless someone keeps rebuilding it. The real general will not need rebuilding. And even a fresh clone is a guess at the person, not the person.

The second is consent. The video asks who gets to say no, and nobody on stage answered. Nothing in the session says whether a service member could refuse, which records would be used, or what authority would permit it. What I can say is this. The service holds your records and your work product. Your “digital footprint on their machines,” as Elodine puts it, is theirs to use. As I will get to below, the privacy law lets an agency use its own records internally without asking you. I could not find a rule that requires anyone to ask.

Why this erodes the chain of command

Let me be fair first. Nobody on stage proposed letting a clone authorize anything. The stated use is training: a new person asks the clone of the CIO how to think about a problem. Even Elodine grants that “there are legitimate use cases for this.” Her own worst-case scenario allows the same thing. Her imagined clone of a general “won’t be granted autonomous authority like the real general would have.” She even allows that there are real cases “where something like this might have been helpful,” when a team had a dangerous target in a safe window and “command lags so hard in their communication that the window of opportunity closes.” The problem is what happens next, and it is the part the speakers did not address.

Military doctrine is very clear about one thing. Authority can be handed down. Responsibility cannot. The Army’s mission command doctrine, ADP 6-0, puts it in two sentences: “While commanders can delegate authority, they cannot delegate responsibility. Subordinates are accountable to their commanders for the use of delegated authority, but commanders remain solely responsible and accountable for the actions of their subordinates.” Joint doctrine says command “includes the authority and responsibility for effectively using available resources.”

Chain of command: the line of people, from the top general down to the newest private, where each person answers to the one above. Every order has a name on it.

That rule is the whole point of a chain of command. When something goes wrong, there is a human being whose name is on the decision. Harry Truman kept a sign on his desk that said “The Buck Stops Here.” In his farewell address he explained it: “The President, whoever he is, has to decide. He can’t pass the buck to anybody.”

A digital clone of a leader is a machine for passing the buck. Walk through Elodine’s example, because it is a good one.

A general retires. His clone stays. A team in the field needs a go decision and the real chain of command is slow. So they ask the clone. The clone says yes. They act.

On paper, the law has an answer for who owns that. The airman who acted without a real order owns it. The commander who put the clone on the network owns it. A chatbot cannot hold a commission, which is the legal authority to command, so nothing it says is an order. Responsibility does not vanish.

In practice, everyone now has a story. The airman says the general’s clone cleared it. The officer who approved the clone says the training data was bad. The general was never asked. Elodine calls this manufactured authority, and she predicts exactly this ending: the military “cites the blame as being the bad training data, which in this case is just a person who might not have had any input whatsoever on the actual bot’s construction.” The law still points at someone. The clone just gives everyone a reason to point somewhere else, and it lends the act a general’s name while it does it.

There is a second failure that worries me more, because it does not need a crisis. Any airman can go to the general’s clone, try prompts until it says what he wants, and walk into his commander’s office with a packet that says the general’s AI agrees. That is not a hypothetical about AI. That is how people already game their bosses. The clone just makes it faster, and gives the answer a general’s name.

The nearest rule on the books does not reach this. Department of Defense Directive 3000.09, updated in January 2023, says autonomous weapons must leave “appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.” It covers weapons, and even there it does not require a person in the loop for every shot. It says nothing about an adviser that talks like your boss. Elodine’s line is that “there are no guardrails demanding a point of accountability.” For an advisory clone, she is right. The department, which has also used the name Department of War since September 2025, published an AI strategy in January 2026 that calls for “single accountable leaders” for its AI programs. That is the right instinct. A clone of a retiree is the opposite of a single accountable leader.

I spent part of my Marine Corps time in a network operations billet, which is a Marine’s assigned job. I have seen what happens when a decision needs an authority that is not in the room. People wait, or people guess. A box that answers with the general’s face solves the waiting. It does not solve the guessing. It hides it.

And it is already in reach. GenAI.mil, the Pentagon’s shared chatbot portal for its workforce, went live in December 2025. The department announced ChatGPT for it in February 2026, and on August 31, 2026, it launched military-specific versions of ChatGPT and Grok on the portal. By then more than 1.7 million people had used it. OpenAI for Government started in June 2025 with a contract worth up to $200 million. Nobody has shown a working expert clone on that portal. But the parts to build one are not a research project. They are on the desktop. And that is why the “learn it at home on your personal account” advice bothers me. The day the tool arrives at work, the people who vibe coded a general at home on the weekend will be the experts in the room.

The civil rights part

Elodine’s second half is about the rest of us. Here I have to correct her on one point and then agree with her on the big one.

The correction. She says the Privacy Act of 1974 “gives ownership to the U.S. government of any system of records regarding any U.S. citizen.” That is not what the law does. The Privacy Act is a set of limits on what federal agencies can do with records about you. It defines a “system of records.” It makes agencies publish what they keep. It requires them to collect only what they need. It gives you the right to see your file and ask for corrections. Its core rule is that an agency may not disclose your record without your written consent. It even bars agencies from keeping records on how you exercise your First Amendment rights, unless a law allows it or it is part of a real law enforcement activity. That last rule is aimed squarely at the “you seem likely to join civil unrest” model Elodine fears.

System of records: the Privacy Act’s term for any group of government files that the agency looks up by a person’s name or ID number.

Now the part where she is right. The same law has holes big enough to drive a clone through. The consent rule has a built-in exception for the agency’s own employees who need the record to do their jobs. Building a clone of an Air Force official, from Air Force records, for Air Force use, fits inside that exception. Agencies can also share your records for any “routine use” they publish in the Federal Register, the government’s daily rulebook, as long as the use is “compatible” with why the data was collected. And the Act’s exemption sections let agencies switch off your right to see and correct records when the records are classified, or compiled for criminal law enforcement, or gathered for a clearance investigation and tied to a confidential source. The Department of Defense lists many such exempt systems in its own Privacy Act regulation. So she is wrong about ownership and right about the effect. For classified, law enforcement, and clearance records, your right to see and correct what they built from you can be switched off by regulation.

There is one lever here, and I want to name it. A clone that you look up by a person’s name is, by the Act’s own definition, a system of records. That means the agency should have to publish a notice describing it in the Federal Register before it runs. Readers can look for that notice. Elodine’s FOIA request can ask whether one exists. If the clones are real and there is no notice, that is a violation with a name.

System of records notice (SORN): the public notice an agency must publish before it starts a new system of records, saying what it holds, about whom, and who can see it.

The bigger hole is not in the Privacy Act at all. It is the third-party doctrine. For decades, courts said that information you give to a company, like a phone company or a bank, is not private from the government. The Supreme Court narrowed that in Carpenter v. United States in 2018. It ruled that seven days or more of your phone’s historical location records need a warrant. But that case was about one kind of data. Agencies have been buying the rest for years from data brokers, companies that collect and resell personal information. A 2022 intelligence community report, declassified in 2023, said as much in plain language. The Supreme Court has not ruled on whether buying it is a search.

Third-party doctrine: the legal idea that once you share information with a company, you have given up your privacy in it, so the government can get it without a warrant.

Then there is the consolidation. Executive Order 14243, signed March 20, 2025, ordered agencies to give designated officials “full and prompt access to all unclassified agency records, data, software systems, and information technology systems.” Its stated purpose was fighting waste and fraud. In May 2025 the New York Times reported on Palantir’s role in linking records across agencies. Fact checkers found no single “database of every American,” and confirmed that the data-sharing push is real. My view is that the distinction does not matter much. Linked systems that can be searched together do the same job as one database.

Put the pieces together. A person-shaped model needs a person-shaped pile of data. The military already has much of that for everyone who ever served, for everyone who ever held a clearance, and for everyone who was listed on a clearance form. Elodine’s point about the general’s family is the chilling one. A clearance holder’s spouse, children, and close friends are listed, by name, on the forms, and some of them get records checks of their own. That is a ready-made list of people to model. And the government already runs automated record checks on clearance holders between investigations, under a program called Continuous Vetting. Elodine’s imagined excuse, “there’s a five-year backlog on these checks, AI helps us understand the weakest links,” is not science fiction. It is a feature request for a program that exists.

Once you have models of a group, you can ask the models questions you could never ask the people. Who is most receptive to pressure? Who would take money? Who would break first? Elodine aims that scenario at “individuals of interest from around the world.” I am extending it to the people already in the files at home, because nothing I can find in the rules stops that.

That is not a weapon against an enemy. That is a tool for running your own population.

The logical next step

Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general, used his farewell address in January 1961 to warn about “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Most people stop there. A few paragraphs later he added a second warning: that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

The thing on the stage in Montgomery was both warnings at once. A vendor sat next to its customers and shaped what the government thinks it should build next. And what they agreed to build is people. Copies of the government’s own experts, first. The copies are made from records, and the government has records on all of us. The step after that is not announced. It is possible, and nothing in the rules I found stops it.

Elodine’s sharpest line is about limits. She says we have “destroyed the only bottleneck totalitarian governments had, which was processing information without any protections.” There were always more files than clerks. AI removes that limit. That is what she means when she says “we are there,” and I do not think she is being dramatic.

I do not think the people on that stage are villains. I think they are solving a real problem, the loss of expertise when people retire, with a tool that happens to be the same tool you would use to build a surveillance state. The problem is that nobody in the room said that part. Elodine did, after the fact, with the recording.

What I would want to see

I am an engineer. I would rather fix something than yell about it. So here is what a sane version of this would require, if it has to happen at all:

  1. A named human on every decision. A clone’s output is advice. It is never authorization. Any order that cites a clone must carry the name of the living officer who owns it.
  2. Consent and a right to refuse. Nobody’s likeness or judgment gets modeled without a signed yes, with the right to pull it later. Retiring should end the clone, not activate it.
  3. An expiration date. A snapshot of a person starts going stale the day it is taken. Clones should expire and be rebuilt with fresh consent, or not at all.
  4. Proof that it beats a search box. Before anyone impersonates an expert, show that the clone answers better than a plain search over that expert’s own documents. If it does not, build the search instead.
  5. A log of every prompt. If an airman shops a clone for the answer he wants, the whole trail should be visible to his commander and to the inspector general, the office that investigates wrongdoing inside the service.
  6. A public notice for every person-model. The Privacy Act already requires it. Publish the SORN before the clone runs, not after someone files a FOIA request.
  7. No models of civilians’ daily lives without a warrant. Buying the data from a broker should be treated as a search, because that is what it is.

None of this is hard to write down. All of it is hard to want, if your goal is speed. That is the tell.

The quote that stuck with me is not the one about clones. It is the one about the roadmap. “These conferences and keynotes are, at the end of the day, a roadmap for the future, a way for the United States and its military to soft-launch ideas before folks have ever had to deal with them in the real world.” She is right. That is why it matters that someone watched the recording closely and said what was on it.

Sources

Written on October 13, 2026