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.