Gray State: Pentagon Signs Deal To Make Palantir AI "Maven" Its Core Military System - Its Most 'Revolutionary' Surveillance Tool Yet To Track Civilians And Increase The Kill Chain
- Mar 23
- 5 min read
Source: Wine Press News
Palantir has deepened its ties within the Trump administration and the Pentagon, after it was revealed this week the Department of War struck a deal with the AI defense contractor to act as the DoW’s core AI military system.
As first reported by Reuters:
Palantir’s Maven artificial intelligence system will become an official program of record, Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg said in a letter to Pentagon leaders, a move that locks in long-term use of Palantir’s weapons-targeting technology across the U.S. military.
In the March 9 letter to senior Pentagon leaders and U.S. military commanders, Feinberg said embedding Palantir’s Maven Smart System would provide warfighters “with the latest tools necessary to detect, deter, and dominate our adversaries in all domains”.
The decision is expected to go into effect by the close of the current fiscal year, which ends in September, according to the letter, which was reviewed by Reuters and has not been previously reported.Maven is a command-and-control software platform that analyzes battlefield data and identifies targets. It is already the primary AI operating system for the U.S. military, which has carried out thousands of targeted strikes against Iran over the last three weeks.Designating Maven as a program of record will streamline its adoption across all arms of the military and provide stable, long-term funding, Feinberg said.The memo ordered oversight of
Maven be moved from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to the Pentagon’s Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office within 30 days. Future contracting with Palantir will be handled by the Army, the letter said.“It is imperative that we invest now and with focus to deepen the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) across the Joint Force and establish AI-enabled decision-making as the cornerstone of our strategy,” Feinberg wrote.
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Maven — which is a Yiddish word that means “connoisseur, expert, know-it-all” — was first formed in 2017 as a means of accelerating the adoption of machine learning and data integration across U.S. military intelligence workflows, primarily in intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance along with geospatial intelligence. Maven coalesces data from drones, satellites, and other sensors to mark potential targets, provide collected intelligence to analysts, and transmit their decisions to operational systems.
In September 2024, Palantir announced a nearly $100 million contract from the Pentagon to expand Maven across its six branches.
“To stay ahead of our adversaries, we must deliver software advantage at speed and at every level of the Department of Defense,” said Shannon Clark, Head of Defense Growth, Palantir. “NGA has been a leader in rapidly adopting the strongest AI capabilities to enable warfighters around the globe, and we are excited to support the program as it scales to meet critical infrastructure requirements across all of the services.”
Last week, Palantir provided a demonstration showcasing its capabilities at their AIPCon 9 forum — which this year’s theme featured two interlocking rings that say “There Are NO Secrets.”
Cameron Stanley, Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer of the Department of War, showcased what Maven can do.
“This is Maven’s smart system. Palantir’s software-as-a-service product that we are deploying across the entire department. As you can see, it’s not just one data feed, it’s multiple.
“As you can see, it's not just one data feed, it's multiple. And instead of having eight or nine systems for those decision makers to look at every single day in order for them to make decisions, you then fuse it into a single visualization tool. The single visualization tool allows you to select, deselect different types of data, look at different approaches to data, but more importantly, action from the same system that you're trying to develop your workflows around.“
Once you have a detection that you wanna actually move and actually move into a targeting workflow, for example, this is what we do.
Left-click, right-click, left-click, magically, it becomes a detection. That detection then gets moved into a workflow.“This is standard digitized workflow, but I wanna walk you through it quickly. You have different types of targets that are identified on the left there. Every single column produces a different type of decision-making process.
Once you have that decision and you're trying to actually action that process, we now move into co-generation, course of action generation, where we are automatically, via a number of factors, trying to identify what the best asset to prosecute a target looks like. “Once we've got the different approaches and we select one, we then can move directly into how do we action that target. We've gone from identifying the target to now coming up with a course of action to now actioning that target, all from one system.
“This is revolutionary. We were having this done in about eight or nine systems where humans were literally moving detections left and right in order to get to our desired end state. (8:19) In this case, actually closing a kill chain.“[…] But more importantly, connect those disparate systems in a way that's never been done before, using an abstraction layer called Maven Smart System that connects and interconnects all of those things with the right data approach, the right data ontology, and the right data formatting to connect these systems. This is not something that happened overnight. This took seven years to get here, not only from a data connections perspective, but also to connect each of those systems together.”
On the sidelines of Palantir’s forum event, co-founder and CEO Alex Karp told CNBC:
“The fact that you can now target more precisely, more accurately, more quickly, and that, meaning America, can do all these, organize the total power of our fleet and all of our resources, and bring it to bear against our adversaries and enemies has shifted the way in which war is fought. And I have read that Palantir’s Project Maven is the core backbone of that.”
Palantir has been quite controversial as it manages a myriad of very personal data on people and uses the collected data to power “the kill chain.” Its technology, for example, has been heavily used by the Israeli Defense Force to launch autonomous strikes in Gaza.
But the issue goes beyond defense contracting, as many have worried that Palantir will and is currently being used against ordinary Americans and others around the world to be intrusively spied upon.
