How Project Maven Put A.I. Into the Kill Chain

But Cukor insists that Maven was never supposed to be a weapon. He frequently defends the project as nothing more than an integrated data platform, which will afford its human users a dramatically increased capacity to make wise and careful decisions. With this positive vision in mind, Manson makes it at least intermittently possible to root for Cukor—as one roots for the insouciant Maverick in the “Top Gun” films—as he struggles with computer-vision models that don’t work, colleagues who jealously hoard their data, users who prefer the systems they know, a top brass set in its old kludgy ways, and peacenik tech workers. In 2018, Google employees staged a massive walkout to protest the company’s work on a primitive iteration of the project.

In the aftermath of the Google fiasco, Cukor turns to Palantir (in addition to Microsoft and Amazon) to make Maven a reality. The contract, Manson notes, almost certainly rescued an otherwise ailing Palantir from corporate oblivion. It also may have rescued Maven, which ultimately overcame the bitter skepticism of the defense establishment. Manson’s story culminates with the war in Ukraine, in which Maven has helped mitigate Russia’s advantages; the conflict became an inflection point for comprehensive national adoption. The Pentagon’s current contract ceiling for Maven is $1.3 billion. Former Mavenites have assumed positions of great power and influence in both the Trump Administration and a closely allied faction of the tech sector, which grew bored with mindless consumer apps in favor of a muscular military-industrial complex. Our allies, too, have been convinced: NATO now has its own Maven contract with Palantir, and that prompted ten member nations to pursue one, too. At any given time, thousands of people are logged in, monitoring thousands of information flows distilled into a clean user interface that recalls the cinematic touchscreens of “Minority Report.”

The Maven Smart System has become a global surveillance apparatus—it can keep track of forty-nine thousand airfields all over the world—but its current work is hardly limited to intelligence provision and analysis. A “single click,” Manson reports, “could send coordinates through a tactical data link to a specific weapons platform so that it could fire at the target.” The entire process, from target identification to target destruction, is four clicks. In 2023, one source told her that he could sign off on eighty targets in an hour: “Accept. Accept. Accept.” The old system could hit fewer than a hundred targets a day; the new system can hit a thousand, and with the recent integration of L.L.M.s that number has risen to five thousand. It was crucial in the “precision” mass-bombing in Iran. Officials told Manson that Maven was “accelerating operations and ‘enabling lethality’ at combat headquarters around the world.” It is also, predictably, being repurposed for border control and drug policing at home.

And Maven is only one part of the A.I. tool kit. Manson uncovers evidence of two clandestine killer-robot programs, one aerial and the other aquatic, which are being developed in haste. Should China make a move against Taiwan, the straits between them will resemble, as one U.S. commander had it, a “hellscape” of armed automata. For the first time, the Pentagon’s proposed budget contained a line item for comprehensively self-directing systems, requesting an allocation of more than thirteen billion dollars. A machine can shoot, Manson reports, up to “ten times faster than an assassin.” This gives the “autonomy hawks” something like an erotic frisson: one source says that “there’s really nothing quite like seeing a machine aim,” explaining their sense of “an alien aspect, some otherworld[ly] feeling, I don’t want to say ‘religious,’ that’s not the right word.”

But Cukor, who hit his thirty-year up-or-out deadline without getting a star, had long since been removed to lucrative work in the private sector. Manson catches up with him at the beach, near his home in Los Angeles. “He always foresaw a union between human and machine, not a machine takeover,” she writes. He’d once told her that the problem with war was that humans are “materially corrupt, inefficient, and they get tired.” Their weaknesses could be balanced with machine strengths. “ ‘If you get these things tuned up the right way, they can perform better than humans,’ he insisted. AI might help assail the inevitable problem: ‘War is fraught with human error.’ ”