In order to strike a blistering 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours of its attack on Iran, the U.S. military leveraged the most advanced artificial intelligence it’s ever used in warfare, a tool that could be difficult for the Pentagon to give up even as it severs ties with the company that created it.
The military’s Maven Smart System, which is built by data mining company Palantir, is generating insights from an astonishing amount of classified data from satellites, surveillance and other intelligence, helping provide real-time targeting and target prioritization to military operations in Iran, according to three people familiar with the system.
Embedded into the system is Anthropic’s AI tool Claude, a technology that was banned by the Pentagon last week after heated negotiations over the terms of its use in war.
Over the last year military planners have seen Claude, paired with Maven, mature into a tool that is in daily use across most parts of the military, according to two of the people.
As planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance, said two of the people. The pairing of Maven and Claude has created a tool that is speeding the pace of the campaign, reducing Iran’s ability to counterstrike and turning weeks-long battle planning into real-time operations, said one of the people. The AI tools also evaluate a strike after it is initiated, the person said.
Claude has also been used in countering terror plots and in the raid that captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. But this is the first time it has been used in major war operations, according to two of the people.
Even though the tool is being used to support the U.S. military campaign in Iran, relations between Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, and the Trump administration have soured. Hours before the bombing in Iran began, President Donald Trump announced he was banning government agencies from further using Anthropic’s tools, giving the department six months to phase them out. The move came after a bitter fight between the company and the military over control of using the tools in mass domestic surveillance and fully autonomous weapons.
The military will continue using its technology as it waits for a replacement to be phased in, said two of the people.
Military commanders have become so dependent on the AI system that if Amodei directed the military to cease, the Trump administration would use government powers to retain the technology until it can be replaced, said one of the people.
“Whether his morals are right or wrong or whatever, we’re not going to let [Amodei’s] decision making cost a single American life,” the person said.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Anthropic spokesman Eduardo Maia Silva declined to comment. Palantir spokeswoman Lisa Gordon declined to comment. Claude’s use in the Iran strikes was first reported by The Wall Street Journal.
The use of advanced generative AI in the Iran campaign arrives at a moment of fierce debate over the ethics and speed of using such tools in warfare.
“It is notable that we’re already at the point where AI has gone from hypothetical to supporting real-world operations being conducted today,” said Paul Scharre, executive vice president at the Center for a New American Security, and who has written about AI in warfare. “The key paradigm shift is that AI enables the U.S. military to develop targeting packages at machine speed rather than human speed.”
The downsides, he said, are “AI gets it wrong. … We need humans to check the output of generative AI when the stakes are life and death.”
The Pentagon began to integrate Anthropic’s Claude chatbot into Maven in late 2024, according to public announcements. The system has been used to generate proposed targets, to track logistics and provide summaries of intelligence coming in from the field. The Trump administration has vastly expanded the use of Maven into many other parts of the military, with over 20,000 military personnel using it as of last May.
The commanders now overseeing the Iran campaign are steeped in the use of Maven, having used earlier versions of the system in the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and to support Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, according to a talk by Navy Rear Adm. Liam Hulin in 2024. Hulin, now the deputy director of operations at Central Command, said then that the system pulled in information from 179 sources of data.
“Centcom is heavily using MSS,” Hulin said, referring to Maven by an acronym.
It was not immediately clear if Maven’s target lists were shared with the Israelis prior to the attack, but the two sides collaborated on what to strike for months. The Israel Defense Forces “in close cooperation with the U.S. Army, worked for thousands of hours to build as valuable and extensive a target bank as possible,” they said in a statement shortly after operations began.
Anthropic was the first major AI company to work with classified data, as the Pentagon works to leverage the technology to help it modernize how it conducts war. Amodei said last week that Claude was “extensively deployed” across the Defense Department and at other security agencies, in use for analyzing intelligence and planning operations.
“I believe deeply in the existential importance of using AI to defend the United States and other democracies, and to defeat our autocratic adversaries,” Amodei wrote in a blog post as negotiations with the Pentagon reached an impasse.
It’s been quickly adopted. NATO, which signed a contract with Palantir last year, portrayed its version of Maven as giving commanders video-game like abilities to oversee battles in a recent video. In the American military, the system allowed one artillery unit to do the work of 2,000 staff with a team of just 20 people, according to a study of the system’s use by the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps by Georgetown University.
But other AI companies are now poised to supplant Anthropic at the Pentagon. Elon Musk’s xAI signed an agreement last week to work on classified government systems, as did Anthropic’s leading rival, OpenAI. (The Washington Post has a content partnership with OpenAI.)
Ben Van Roo, the CEO and cofounder of Legion Intelligence, a defense software startup, said that in his work over the last two and half years integrating generative AI into software systems at the Department of War, “the baseline use case is chat and advanced search functions — essentially summarizing information.”
It’s not highly integrated into weapons or mission critical systems, he said. He said that he wasn’t aware of its use in Iran, but wondered how it built on existing software that is already able to prioritize targets.
Scharre said he was impressed by the speed of deployment in Iran. “It’s quite remarkable — to see this in the middle of an operation,” he added.
The post Anthropic’s AI tool Claude central to U.S. campaign in Iran, amid a bitter feud appeared first on Washington Post.
