Troy Meink, a senior leader at the National Reconnaissance Office, is President-elect Donald Trump’s choice to serve as secretary of the Air Force. The former and future commander-in-chief announced his pick Thursday on Truth Social. As the civilian head of the Department of the Air Force — which also includes the Space Force — Meink would be responsible for leading the service during a period of wide-ranging modernization. If confirmed by the Senate, he’d be expected to play a key role in deciding the future of the Next-Generation Air Dominance program. The department is also pursuing Collaborative Combat Aircraft, the B-21 stealth bomber, a Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, AI capabilities, modernized cyber and IT tools, and the DAF Battle Network, among other technologies. Meink has been serving as principal deputy director of NRO, a position he was appointed to during the first Trump administration in 2020. In that role, he was tasked with “overall day-to-day management of the NRO, with decision responsibility as delegated by the Director.”

Federal agencies with top-secret workloads can now use OpenAI’s GPT-4o through Microsoft’s Azure for U.S. Government Top Secret cloud. Microsoft announced Thursday it received authorization for 26 additional products in its top-secret cloud environment, meeting Intelligence Community Directive (ICD) 503 standards and allowing agencies — particularly those in the intelligence community and Defense Department — to use them for the government’s most classified information. Those added tools include Azure OpenAI Service — which provides Azure customers access to OpenAI’s generative AI large language models — and Azure Machine Learning, among others.

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