How Project Maven taught the military to love AI

In the first 24 hours of the assault on Iran, the US military struck more than 1,000 targets, nearly double the scale of the “shock and awe” attack on Iraq over two decades ago. This acceleration was made possible by AI systems that speed up the targeting process. Chief among them is the Maven Smart System.

How Project Maven taught the military to love AI

A new book shows how the controversial Silicon Valley partnership has accelerated the pace of war

In her new book, Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare, journalist Katrina Manson investigates the development of Maven from its inception in 2017 as an experiment in applying computer vision to drone footage. The project spurred employee protests at Google, the military’s initial contractor, prompting the company to back out. Pushed forward by a Marine intelligence officer named Drew Cukor, whose story forms the backbone of Project Maven, the system ended up being built by Palantir and draws on technologies developed by Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic, and others. Now used across the US armed forces and recently purchased by NATO, Maven synthesizes satellite imagery, radar, social media, and dozens of other data sources to identify and target entities on the battlefield. It also speeds up what’s called the “kill chain.”

Maven combines computer vision with a sort of workflow management system that finds targets, pairs them with weapons, and allows users to quickly click through the other steps of a targeting cycle. A process that once took hours can now be completed in seconds. An official tells Manson that the technology has allowed the US to go from hitting under a hundred targets a day to a thousand, and with the addition of LLMs, up to five thousand targets a day.

One of the thousand targets struck on the first day of the Iran war was a girls’ school, killing more than 150 people, mostly children. The school had previously been part of an Iranian naval base, yet it was listed online as a school and playgrounds were visible on satellite imagery. While much of the coverage after the strike focused on possible hallucinations by Claude, the technology historian Kevin Baker wrote in The Guardian that Maven and the acceleration it enabled is the more relevant place to look. “A chatbot did not kill those children,” he wrote. “People failed to update a database, and other people built a system fast enough to make that failure lethal.”

The pace of war is set to accelerate further. Manson uncovers military programs to develop fully autonomous weapons — including an explosive-laden drone Jet Ski — capable of targeting and destroying targets on their own.

Colonel Cukor was an early and determined proponent of AI. He was frustrated that data was in Excel and PowerPoint and he wanted an analytic tool that would bring intelligence to the frontline military operators. He had this vision for what he called “white dots” — that there would be white dots shown on a map infused with intelligence information.

When the Google deal falls apart, Palantir steps in. Microsoft and AWS take a much bigger role in producing the algorithms and also in the compute. Today, Maven Smart System is a “program of record” and Palantir is the prime contractor. Ukraine became a really important moment where the artillery fire team realizes that AI can help them speed up their operations and targeting.