The pilot fellowship drew Marines at multiple ranks and statuses: officers and enlisted (explicitly including at least one corporal) and also government civilian employees. MOS (job) restrictions are not specified in the public coverage—participants were described as coming from across the service and chosen for operational problem-sets rather than a single MOS.
The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) is a defense-focused graduate university (master’s and PhD) in Monterey, CA that provides classified and interdisciplinary education and conducts research to advance naval/warfighting technology. For this fellowship NPS provides targeted AI instruction, faculty mentorship, research facilities and a platform to prototype and test AI solutions with Marines.
The Corps’ AI implementation plan (published Apr 2025) sets goals across workforce development, mission alignment, governance, infrastructure, and partnerships; it assigns responsibilities (notably the Deputy Commandant for Information/DC I, TECOM, DC M&RA, MCSC and MC Forces Cyberspace Command) and includes timelines for key tasks (e.g., governance actions by Sept 2025; workforce and use‑case actions by Mar–Apr 2026; infrastructure and data modernization milestones through 2026–2027).
The fellowship is intended to support applied, operational AI use cases across the force — examples from the inaugural cohort include an LLM-based maintenance paperwork assistant for a battalion maintenance facility and an edge‑deployed LLM tool to automate/streamline cybersecurity operational testing at MCOTEA. More broadly it targets data analysis, process automation, decision‑support, prototyping for fleet needs and proof‑of‑concepts that can be productionized.
Public coverage states governance and oversight will be emphasized: the implementation plan directs DC I to incorporate AI governance into inspection regimes and to perform policy analysis; leaders stress that AI must augment, not replace Marines and that governance structures must remain robust. Specific program-level ethical/legal review bodies are not named in the public article.
Success is measured by workforce development and transition of prototypes to operations: the fellowship reports presentations to Marine leaders, accuracy/performance metrics for prototypes (e.g., a cited 93.3% accuracy for the MCOTEA cyber-testing tool), and linkage into productionization pathways (Marine Corps Software Factory, planned Center for Digital Transformation). The implementation plan also defines milestones, inspections, and timelines (e.g., governance, data‑centric inspections, pilot Center timeline) to gauge and scale progress.