A top Pentagon official provided a rare look inside how the military uses Palantir’s Project Maven to carry out strikes.
Once you detect something you want to target, “this is what we do,” Cameron Stanley, the Department of Defense’s chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, said during a presentation at Palantir’s AIPCon 9.
“Left click, right click, left click,” he said.
Palantir posted a video of Stanley’s demonstration over the weekend showing how the system could use satellite imagery alongside multiple data feeds, including a flight-tracking system.
Using the system, he highlighted how the list of potential targets could be narrowed to a specific car in the parking lot.
In another part of the demo, Stanley showed how artificial intelligence is used to identify “what the best asset” is to carry out the strike. For the demonstration, it was a mounted .50-caliber M2 Browning machine gun on a Stryker armored fighting vehicle.
“We’ve gone from identifying the target, to now coming up with a course of action, to now actioning that target all within one system,” Stanley said. “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 a desire end state, in this case actually closing a kill chain,” he said, pointing to combat footage of a strike.
“When we started this, it literally took hours to do what you just saw,” he said of the process of going from detection to targeting to decision-making to engagement. “We’ve been able to reduce that time significantly.”
Palantir CEO Alex Karp and his deputies are somewhat cagey about exactly what Project Maven entails, given its classified uses. Citing information “in the papers,” Karp said that his company has provided the US and its allies an advantage on the battlefield.
“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,” Karp told CNBC on the sidelines of the conference. “And I have read that Palantir’s Project Maven is the core backbone of that.”
The Army’s Commander and Staff Guide to Data Literacy says that Maven is part of “the cutting-edge capabilities” troops rely on “to assist in targeting and executing strikes.”
“While MSS can greatly enable the decision-making process, staff members will need to have a cursory understanding of how these emerging systems function to fully appreciate their capabilities and limitations,” the guide reads, referring to the Maven Smart System.
The MSS has been an integral part of the US’s War in Iran, The Washington Post recently reported. Anthropic’s Claude is embedded in the system, a topic of major discussion after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth moved to effectively blacklist the AI startup after it refused to give the Pentagon unfettered access to its AI models.
Business Insider has not independently confirmed Maven’s use in Operation Epic Fury nor the integration of Anthropic’s models into Maven’s systems. Spokespersons for the Pentagon and Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
President Donald Trump ordered all federal agencies to stop using Anthropic’s products within six months. Anthropic has sued the Pentagon, the Executive Office of the President, and a host of other federal agencies to block Hegseth and Trump’s directives.
Initially overseen by Google, Palantir took over Project Maven, part of the software company’s highly successful partnerships with the US and allied governments. Karp boasted last year that Palantir’s products are so popular that he doesn’t have time for US allies who hassle the company with endless meeting requests.
“I’m telling governments all over the world, look, we’re not showing up to do this sales call for Maven,” Karp told podcaster Molly O’Shea in November 2025. “You know it works. We know it works. Show up to my office and explain how you’re going to make this easy for us, because we don’t have huge bandwidth.”
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