Meet the Gods of AI Warfare

The rise of AI warfare speaks to the biggest moral and practical question there is: Who—or what—gets to decide to take a human life? And who bears that cost? In 2018, more than 3,000 Google workers protested the company’s involvement in “the business of war” after finding out the company was part of Project Maven, then a nascent Pentagon effort to use computer vision to rifle through copious video footage taken in America’s overseas drone wars. They feared Project Maven’s AI could one day be used for lethal targeting.

In my yearslong effort to uncover the full story of Project Maven for my book, Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare, I learned that is exactly what happened, and that the undertaking was just as controversial inside the Pentagon. But that didn’t slow its forward march. Today, the tool known as Maven Smart System is being used in US operations against Iran. How the US military’s top brass moved from skepticism about the use of AI in war to true believers has a lot to do with a Marine colonel named Drew Cukor.

In early September 2024, during the cocktail hour at a private retreat for tech investors and defense leaders, Vice Admiral Frank “Trey” Whitworth found his way to Drew Cukor. Now Project Maven’s founding leader and his skeptical successor were standing face-to-face.

Three years earlier, Whitworth had been the Pentagon’s top military official for intelligence, advising the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and running one of the most sensitive and potentially lethal parts of any military process: targeting. Colonel Cukor, an intense Marine intelligence officer described to me by one of his seniors as “a one-man wrecking ball” who took on military orthodoxy, defense bureaucracy and the pursuit of AI warfare to his own cost, was wrapping up his five years as Project Maven’s chief.

In a meeting so tense some present had squirmed, I learned that Whitworth—an exacting former SEAL Team 6 intelligence director who sat on the military targeting committee for nearly two decades—had drilled Cukor about whether Maven and its use of AI was skipping crucial steps in the targeting process, moving too fast and bending rules.

“Tell me about what happens after the bad drop when we go through a congressional [hearing] and we’re getting hard questions?” Whitworth demanded.

He worried about record-keeping and accountability when it came to involving AI in targeting, and he expressed strong doubt that Project Maven was worth the billion dollars Congress had already spent on it, much of which had gone to Silicon Valley’s controversial upstart darling: Palantir.

When Whitworth took charge of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in June 2022 and became responsible for the future of Project Maven following Cukor’s departure, he still worried that Project Maven was overpriced, overhyped, and incautious about the targeting principles he most cared about. Whitworth could have shut the program down in a heartbeat. The future of Cukor’s baby looked increasingly in doubt. “We were all very concerned,” Cukor told me in one of our weekly afternoon talks over the course of more than a year. “Trey was not a friend.”

I would come to see Cukor as a leading historical figure in a war that hasn’t happened yet. That seemed to be what almost everyone to do with Project Maven thought, whether they feted or hated him. Alex Karp, Palantir’s chief executive, referred approvingly to Cukor as “crazy Cukor” and called him “the founding father of AI targeting.” After his showdown with Whitworth, Cukor told others: “I will either be famous or live in infamy.”

But now, more than two years into leading the NGA and more than two years into Russia’s war against Ukraine, rather than abandoning Maven, Whitworth praised the program. “Drew, this is important work,” he assured Cukor at the September 2024 event. Maven Smart System—the software platform built by Palantir that brought together disparate battlefield and other data on a digital map and displayed AI detections that could be deployed in targeting—was adaptable. It could integrate with any system and become new with each software update. It could do what people wanted.

Cukor described the vice admiral as methodical, saying that Whitworth had just reasoned his way to endorsing Maven. Cukor thought Whitworth had come to understand why the US needed to bring AI into the targeting cycle. (The portion of Maven’s $250 million annual budget that went to NGA may also have helped, he thought.) “It speaks to his character, honestly,” said Cukor. “It wasn’t an apology as much as a formal recognition. We didn’t hug, but it was an important conversation.”

Under Whitworth, Maven would have its coming-out party, emerging from years of secrecy tightly maintained under Cukor in the wake of the Google protests. Six months earlier, deciding to shoot comprised the shortest element of the targeting cycle. Now every other part of the cycle was so close to being automated, and so compressed in time, that deciding to shoot was the lengthiest part. Internal documentation referred to Maven ATR: automatic target recognition. In public, Whitworth started describing Maven as his agency’s “marquee targeting program of record.”

A few days after he spoke with Cukor, Whitworth stepped onto a stage for a livestreamed Palantir customer event. He could hardly have cut a stronger contrast with the Palo Alto crowd: His service dress blues came with gold buttons, gold threads round his sleeves, and bright ribbons. In his high-shine formal black shoes, he stood in front of a cabinet displaying colorful Nike sneakers. His talk on Maven Smart System followed directly after two other Palantir customers, one who leased railcars and another who supplied automotive seating. War was now just another business process, sandwiched between sales and health care.

Amit Kukreja, a prominent Palantir commentator, investor, and fan of the company’s “merch,” was narrating the event live off to the side. He described it as a “new and special” moment for Palantir’s retail investors to learn about the company’s government work. Even Karp appeared taken aback. “I didn’t even know we were allowed to talk about this stuff,” he said, after laying claim to the “most elite and interesting” government clients in the world. Palantir had already won an Army contract with a $480 million ceiling for Maven Smart System that spring, and later would win another to supply the system to all military services in September for up to $100 million. In spring 2025, the Pentagon’s contract ceiling for Maven Smart System was raised to $1.3 billion, due to run until 2029. And NATO said it would become a customer for Maven Smart System too. Ten NATO customers were thinking about buying the system for their own country. The UK would reportedly sign a £750 million (roughly $1 billion) deal for Palantir’s military AI tools during a high-profile state visit from Donald Trump in September 2025.

Up on the Palantir stage, Whitworth talked through AI targeting as a screen beside him played a demonstration. An icon flashed up alerting the audience to “Possible Enemy Activity.” A cursor click revealed a group of tanks over a “notional” demonstration map of Kherson in Ukraine. The tanks were four clicks from evisceration. Palantir’s Target Workbench popped up. Two more clicks established the tank group’s height, latitude, and longitude; and then paired the target with an “effector” (in this case an F-22A fighter jet 82 miles away). One more click and a green tick flashed up: “Target destroyed.”

Nearly a year later, on a hot day in the high summer of 2025, I stepped into NGA’s headquarters at the Fort Belvoir Army Base in northern Virginia. It was my second visit to the spy agency HQ, and I wanted to find out why Whitworth had changed his mind, how much Maven had spread, and how Maven’s new backers saw the risks and rewards of mainstreaming AI into military workflow.