A Pentagon AI program called Project Maven is at the center of US strikes against Iran and potentially one of the most significant transformations in modern warfare.
What is this?
Project Maven is the Pentagon’s flagship artificial intelligence program, launched in 2017 as a narrow experiment aimed at helping military analysts make sense of the torrent of drone images pouring in from conflict zones.
Operators were drowning in images, searching frame by frame for objects of interest that might appear for only an instant before disappearing. Maven was designed to find the needle in the haystack.
Eight years later, the program has evolved into something much larger: an AI-assisted targeting and battlefield management system that has dramatically accelerated what is known in warfare as the death chain – the process from initial detection to destruction.
How does it work?
Maven functions as both combat air control and its cockpit.
Aalok Mehta, director of CSIS’s Wadhwani AI Center, described the system as “essentially an overlay” that merges sensor data, enemy troop intelligence, satellite imagery and troop deployment information.
In practice, this means quickly analyzing satellite feeds to detect troop movements or identify targets, while “taking a snapshot of the theater of operations” to determine the best course of action to strike a specific target.
In a recent demonstration posted online, a Pentagon official described how Maven “magically” transforms an observed threat into a targeting workflow, assessing available resources and presenting options to the commander.
The emergence of ChatGPT was another step forward, expanding the use of the technology to a much wider range of users who could interact with Maven in natural language.
For now, that capability is provided by Anthropic’s Claude — although that arrangement is coming to an end after the Pentagon bristled at the AI lab’s demand that its model not be used for fully automated strikes or for tracking U.S. citizens.
Why did Google say no?
The ethical question was an important factor in Maven’s early years, when Google was the program’s first AI contractor.
In 2018, more than 3,000 employees signed an open letter protesting the company’s involvement, arguing that the contract crossed the line. Several engineers resigned.
Google refused to renew the contract when the contract expired and subsequently published AI principles explicitly excluding any participation in weapons systems.
The episode exposed a fault line in Silicon Valley between engineers who saw autonomous targeting as an ethical red line and defense officials who saw it as essential.
Most recently, Google removed restrictions from its AI policy and said it was leaning more toward national security work. The Pentagon said Google, along with xAI and OpenAI, would be close to replacing Claude in Maven.
What is Palantir’s role?
In 2024, Palantir – founded in part with CIA seed funding and built from the start around government intelligence work – entered the space vacated by Google.
The company has reportedly become Maven’s primary technology contractor, and its AI now forms the operational backbone of the program.
Palantir CEO Alex Karp explicitly defines the issues.
“It’s a rich, poor world,” he said at a recent event at Palantir, arguing that it was important for the West to acquire capabilities that the rest of the world lacked.
A system that compresses a kill chain from hours to seconds renders an adversary obsolete, he said.
How did it go?
The Pentagon and Palantir declined to comment on Maven’s performance in the current war with Iran.
The US strikes were carried out at a sustained pace, and it can be assumed that Maven’s ability to speed up the targeting and firing process played a central role.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, after three weeks, the US strike campaign has settled into a rate of between 300 and 500 targets per day.
During the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury, U.S. forces struck more than 1,000 targets, including a school located in a building previously used as a military compound, according to various media reports. Iran said the attack killed 168 children aged between seven and 12 and injured many others.
