{"id":380689,"date":"2026-04-15T13:00:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/380689\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T13:00:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T13:00:10","slug":"how-project-maven-put-a-i-into-the-kill-chain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/380689\/","title":{"rendered":"How Project Maven Put A.I. Into the Kill Chain"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2014as one roots for the insouciant Maverick in the \u201cTop Gun<\/a>\u201d films\u2014as he struggles with computer-vision models that don\u2019t 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\u2019s work on a primitive iteration of the project.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s story culminates with the war in Ukraine, in which Maven has helped mitigate Russia\u2019s advantages; the conflict became an inflection point for comprehensive national adoption. The Pentagon\u2019s 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 \u201cMinority Report.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Maven Smart System has become a global surveillance apparatus\u2014it can keep track of forty-nine thousand airfields all over the world\u2014but its current work is hardly limited to intelligence provision and analysis. A \u201csingle click,\u201d Manson reports, \u201ccould send coordinates through a tactical data link to a specific weapons platform so that it could fire at the target.\u201d 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: \u201cAccept. Accept. Accept.\u201d 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 \u201cprecision\u201d mass-bombing in Iran. Officials told Manson that Maven was \u201caccelerating operations and \u2018enabling lethality\u2019 at combat headquarters around the world.\u201d It is also, predictably, being repurposed for border control and drug policing at home.<\/p>\n

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 \u201chellscape\u201d of armed automata. For the first time, the Pentagon\u2019s 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 \u201cten times faster than an assassin.\u201d This gives the \u201cautonomy hawks\u201d something like an erotic frisson: one source says that \u201cthere\u2019s really nothing quite like seeing a machine aim,\u201d explaining their sense of \u201can alien aspect, some otherworld[ly] feeling, I don\u2019t want to say \u2018religious,\u2019 that\u2019s not the right word.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cHe always foresaw a union between human and machine, not a machine takeover,\u201d she writes. He\u2019d once told her that the problem with war was that humans are \u201cmaterially corrupt, inefficient, and they get tired.\u201d Their weaknesses could be balanced with machine strengths. \u201c\u00a0\u2018If you get these things tuned up the right way, they can perform better than humans,\u2019 he insisted. AI might help assail the inevitable problem: \u2018War is fraught with human error.\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"But Cukor insists that Maven was never supposed to be a weapon. He frequently defends the project as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":380690,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,72530,364,11286,111,139,69,145,198007,127757],"class_list":{"0":"post-380689","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence-a-i","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-drones","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-technology","17":"tag-u-s-marines","18":"tag-u-s-military"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380689","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=380689"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/380689\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/380690"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=380689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=380689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=380689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}