The AI War on Iran: Project Maven, a Secretive Palantir-Run System, Helps Pentagon Pick Bomb Targets

The Trump administration says the United States has struck 11,000 targets in Iran since the U.S.-Israeli war on the country began. Critics have questioned the accuracy of the Maven system, the artificial intelligence system used by the military to speed up the process of identifying targets.

Imagine Google Earth for war, a map of war with white dots, infused with information like elevation, coordinate, what is precisely there, whether it's friendly or foe," says Katrina Manson, a reporter for Bloomberg News and author of Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare.

The Pentagon launched Project Maven in 2017. Google was an initial partner, but the company pulled out after over 3,000 Google employees signed a letter opposing the work. The big data firm Palantir then took over the project and has run it ever since.