New Book Details How Project Maven Accelerated Military Targeting with AI

A new book by journalist Katrina Manson details how Project Maven, a controversial Pentagon AI initiative, has accelerated the pace of warfare by compressing targeting cycles from hours to seconds. Project Maven began 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. The system was subsequently built by Palantir and draws on technologies developed by Microsoft, Amazon, Anthropic, and others. Maven synthesizes satellite imagery, radar, social media, and dozens of other data sources to identify and target entities on the battlefield. 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 large language models, up to five thousand targets a day. The book, titled Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare, follows Marine intelligence officer Drew Cukor, who pushed the project forward. Cukor was motivated by frustration that US military operators in Afghanistan were equipped with poor intelligence tools, with data stored in Excel and PowerPoint. He envisioned an analytic tool that would bring intelligence to frontline operators. Ukraine served as an important inflection point. The 18th Airborne Corps used computer vision on the Maven Smart System to identify Russian positions and equipment. When algorithms initially failed to recognize tanks in snow, new satellite footage was collected and sent back to the US to retrain the algorithms. The US passed what it called points of interest to Ukrainian forces, peaking at 267 points on one day in 2022. The system is now used across the US armed forces and was recently purchased by NATO. By the end of September, Maven Smart System is expected to become a program of record with Palantir as the prime contractor. Military ethicists have raised concerns about the gamification of war and the risk that operators may trust targets presented on screen without fully understanding the underlying data.