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

Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes about a secretive A.I. system that automates warfare for the military. The progression from target identification to target destruction is four clicks.

Each week, our editors select a New Yorker story for you to read: something timely, something important, or something unexpected—or even, perhaps, all three. To support journalism like this, consider subscribing.

Illustration by Ben Kothe; Source photographs from Getty

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

A new book charts the creation of a secretive system that automates warfare for the military. The progression from target identification to target destruction is four clicks.

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

In February, reports emerged that the operation to capture the Venezuelan President, Nicolás Maduro, had not been a strictly human affair. The extrajudicial caper had somehow involved Claude, Anthropic’s large language model. The military had recourse to Claude via a drop-down menu in a workflow package, the Maven Smart System, which gathers, synthesizes, and streamlines intelligence. The government procures M.S.S., as it is called, from Palantir, the sphinxlike defense-tech contractor co-founded by Peter Thiel and an eccentrically jingoistic philosopher named Alex Karp. Claude’s deployment seemed to come as something of a surprise to its parent company, and an Anthropic executive reportedly reached out to a Palantir counterpart to clarify what, exactly, Claude had done in Caracas. When this inquiry was relayed to the Trump Administration, one Administration official told me last month, it was interpreted as a signal that Anthropic, which was then renegotiating its own contract with the federal government, was perhaps a faithless partner. (Anthropic disputed that characterization of events.) This suspicion was confirmed when Anthropic, citing fears of domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weaponry, refused to allow the Pentagon “all lawful uses” of its products. This dispute culminated in the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s designation, by outraged tweet, of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk—a standing peril to national security.

This ban, however, was not effective immediately. The Pentagon apparently needed Claude for one last job. Twelve hours later, the White House began to bomb Iran. Among the casualties of Operation Epic Fury’s first day were more than a hundred and seventy-five people, most of them little girls, at the Shajareh Tayyebeh primary school, in the southern city of Minab. Claude’s potential culpability in this and other potential war crimes was a subject of widespread speculation, not only in the media but in Washington. Congressional Democrats sent a letter to Hegseth demanding a detailed account of how A.I. was being used in the Iran campaign. In an essay for his Substack that was republished, in slightly different form, by the Guardian, the technology scholar Kevin Baker wrote that almost none of the attendant coverage (including mine) “had any relationship to reality.” Maven had only recently added L.L.M.-based functionality, but the program had been around for a decade. Claude, in Baker’s view, was a MacGuffin. It only served to draw attention away from the centrality of Maven as an automated targeting system. He continued, “The real question, the question almost nobody was asking, is not about Claude or any language model. It is a bureaucratic question about what happened to the kill chain, and the answer is Palantir.”

The veteran journalist Katrina Manson, who now covers defense tech for Bloomberg, spent much of the past few years asking precisely that question. Her new book, “Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare,” is an unflaggingly well-reported and well-sourced account of the ongoing reconfiguration of the U.S. armed forces for a new technological era. The book was completed months before Anthropic’s redlines generated new interest in autonomous-drone swarms and killer robots, but even then the writing was on the wall. Dystopian carnage isn’t coming, she warns at the end of her introduction. It is “already here.”

“Project Maven” is structured as an intellectual and professional biography of Drew Cukor, a Marine Corps intelligence officer largely responsible for the eventual “success” of this military transformation. The narrative begins shortly after September 11th, when Cukor finds himself among the first troops on the ground in Afghanistan. His first mission, as part of an expeditionary unit sent to seize Kandahar Airport from the Taliban, finds him inside a blacked-out helicopter where the place of a lance corporal has been taken by a bulky P.C.—the paleolithic version of Claude en route to Venezuela. The computer was loaded with state-of-the-art tools to assist Cukor and his unit in target assessment, threat detection, mission planning, and commander briefings: “Excel, Word, Google Earth, and PowerPoint, and some in-house military software none of them liked.”

The problem, as Cukor saw it, was not that American forces lacked facts. They were drowning in intel about hideout caves, weapons stashes, and enemy movements, some of which was culled from surveillance or signals intelligence and some of which came from detainee interrogations. But the Marines had no way to put it all together. Al Qaeda targets were listed in Excel. PowerPoint was for mapping network connections. Word was for writing things up. Google Earth was for zooming in and out. This wasn’t wholly ineffective—as one artillery officer later told Manson, “We’ve killed more people on Office than you’d ever imagine”—but precision munitions were only precise if you knew precisely where to point them. Cukor had no methodical way to “divine the patterns of war.” Over the ensuing decade, he watched soldiers and civilians die over and over because of a lack of organized, integrated information. The military, he’d long thought, required “something ‘vastly different’ from the status quo”: he dreamed of a “single digital grid” that gave a “highly accurate battlespace picture” in real time, a vision of white dots that moved legibly across an “aspirational single pane of glass to clear up the fog of war.”

The realization of this digital pane, which ultimately manifested itself as Project Maven, is one of two stories that Manson tells. It describes the halting development of the substance of what Cukor wanted. In parallel, she recounts the procedural, against-all-odds-ish story of how he went about achieving it. This is the story of Cukor’s private war against a stodgy Pentagon bureaucracy. Cukor, as she portrays him, is a cartoonishly gruff, ball-breaking pain in the ass who overworks himself and mistreats his subordinates and alienates his superiors. He patterns himself after Hyman Rickover, the notoriously bullheaded admiral who single-handedly called into being the Navy’s nuclear-submarine fleet. At the same time, he’s something of an intellectual romantic: his favorite novel, Manson discovers, is “Don Quixote,” which provides her with a ready-made narrative template in which a “tragicomic and misunderstood hero pursues a doomed quest for an idealized version of the world that does not exist, forever trying and failing to save the world and right wrongs.”

Also from The New Yorker:

• Patrick Radden Keefe on New Orleans’s Car-Crash Conspiracy

• An Interview with Elle Fanning

• Why Are People Injecting Themselves with Peptides?