A Pentagon AI program called Project Maven is at the center of US attacks on Iran and potentially one of the most significant transformations of modern warfare.
What is it?
Project Maven is the Pentagon’s flagship artificial intelligence program, launched in 2017 as a limited experiment to help military analysts make sense of the torrent of drone images coming in from conflict zones.
Operators drowned in images, searching frame by frame for objects of interest that might appear only for a moment before disappearing. Maven was created to find the needle in the haystack.
Eight years later, the program has evolved into something much broader: an AI-assisted targeting and battlefield management system that has greatly accelerated what is known in warfare as the kill chain: the process from initial detection to destruction.
How does it work?
Maven functions as the battle’s air traffic control and as its cockpit.
Aalok Mehta, director of the CSIS Wadhwani AI Center, described the system as “essentially an overlay” that fuses sensor data, enemy troop intelligence, satellite imagery and troop deployment information.
In practice, that means quickly scanning satellite transmissions to detect troop movements or identify targets, while also “taking a snapshot of the theater of operations” to determine the best course of action to attack a specific target.
In a recent demo posted online, a Pentagon official described how Maven “magically” turns an observed threat into a targeting workflow, weighing available assets and presenting options to the commander.
The emergence of ChatGPT was another step forward, expanding the use of the technology to a much larger range of users who can interact with Maven in natural language.
For now, this capability is provided by Anthropic’s Claude, although that deal is coming to a bitter end after the Pentagon bristled at the AI lab’s demand that its model not be used for fully automated attacks or the tracking of American citizens.
Why did Google say no?
The ethical question was a factor in Maven’s early years, when Google was the program’s original AI contractor.
In 2018, more than 3,000 employees signed an open letter protesting the company’s involvement, arguing that the contract crossed a line. Several engineers resigned.
Google refused to renew when the contract expired and subsequently published AI principles that explicitly ruled out 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 considered it essential.
More recently, Google lifted restrictions on its artificial intelligence policy and said it is leaning more toward national security work. The Pentagon has said that Google, along with xAI and OpenAI, are on the list to replace Claude at Maven.
What is Palantir’s role?
In 2024, Palantir, founded in part with seed funding from the CIA and built from the ground up around government intelligence work, filled 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 lays out what is at stake.
“This is a world of haves and have-nots,” he said at a recent Palantir event, arguing that it was important for the West to achieve 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 has it been?
The Pentagon and Palantir declined to comment on Maven’s performance in the current war with Iran.
US attacks have been carried out at a sustained pace and it can be assumed that Maven’s ability to speed up the targeting and firing process has played a central role.
According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, after three weeks, the US strike campaign reached a rate of between 300 and 500 targets per day.
In the first 24 hours of Operation Epic Fury, US forces attacked more than 1,000 targets, including a school located in a building formerly used as a military complex, according to multiple media reports. Iran has said the attack killed 168 children between the ages of seven and 12 and wounded many others.
