Pentagon Makes Palantir AI System Official Military Program Nationwide

The U.S. Defense Department will officially adopt Palantir's Maven artificial intelligence system across all military branches by September. The AI platform analyzes battlefield data and helps identify targets, and has already been used in thousands of military strikes.

The U.S. Defense Department will officially integrate Palantir’s Maven artificial intelligence platform across all military branches, according to an internal Pentagon memo obtained by Reuters.

Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg announced in a March 9 letter to top Pentagon officials and military commanders that the Maven Smart System will become a formal program of record. Feinberg stated that implementing this AI technology will equip military personnel “with the latest tools necessary to detect, deter, and dominate our adversaries in all domains.”

The transition is scheduled to take effect before the fiscal year concludes in September, according to the previously unreported correspondence.

Maven serves as a command-and-control software that processes battlefield intelligence and pinpoints targets. The system currently functions as the military’s primary AI platform and has supported thousands of targeted operations against Iran during the past three weeks.

Making Maven an official program will expedite its implementation throughout all military services while ensuring consistent, long-term funding, Feinberg explained in the memo.

The directive requires transferring Maven’s oversight from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to the Pentagon’s Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office within 30 days. The Army will handle future Palantir contracts, the letter specified.

“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 stated in the memo.

Neither Palantir nor the Pentagon provided immediate responses to requests for comment.

This development represents a major victory for Palantir, which has secured an increasing number of government contracts, including a potential $10 billion Army agreement announced last summer. These contracts have contributed to doubling the company’s stock value over the past year, pushing its market capitalization to approximately $360 billion.

The Maven system can quickly process vast quantities of information from satellites, unmanned aircraft, radar systems, sensors and intelligence briefings. It uses artificial intelligence to automatically detect potential threats or targets, including enemy vehicles, structures and ammunition supplies.

At a recent Palantir conference, Pentagon AI office director Cameron Stanley showcased how the Maven platform could support weapons targeting in Middle Eastern operations, displaying heat map images from the system.

“When we started this, it literally took hours to do what you just saw,” Stanley commented during the demonstration, which was recorded in a company YouTube video published last week.

United Nations expert groups have cautioned that AI-powered weapons targeting without human oversight creates ethical, legal and security concerns, as artificial intelligence can inherit unintended biases from its training data.

Palantir maintains that its technology does not make lethal choices and that humans retain full responsibility for target selection and approval.

The company created its AI system for the Pentagon’s Project Maven, which started as a drone image analysis program in 2017. In 2024, the Defense Department granted Palantir a contract valued at up to $480 million. That same year, Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar informed the House Armed Services Committee that Maven served “tens of thousands” of users and requested additional congressional funding. By May 2025, the Pentagon raised the contract limit to $1.3 billion.

A potential challenge for expanded Maven deployment involves the software’s incorporation of Anthropic’s Claude AI technology, as Reuters previously reported. The Pentagon recently classified Anthropic as a supply chain risk following ongoing disputes about AI safety protocols.