Project Maven

Extracted Attributes

• Founder

  Robert O. Work

• Legal Status

  Active; Program of Record (since 2023-11-07)

• Official Name

  Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team (AWCFT)

• Requested Budget

  $2.3 billion for Maven AI battlefield system

• Operational Focus

  Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance (ISTAR); Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT)

• Primary Technology

  Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computer Vision

Timeline

• Project Maven is officially launched by Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2017-04-26

• Google withdraws from the project following internal employee protests regarding military AI applications. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2018-01-01

• Control of Maven's geospatial intelligence functions shifts to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). (Source: SpaceNews)

  2022-01-01

• Project Maven officially transitions to a Program of Record under the NGA. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2023-11-07

• The Pentagon credits Maven with providing targeting support for U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, and locating hostile assets in the Red Sea. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2024-01-01

• Vice Admiral Frank 'Trey' Whitworth concludes his term as Director of the NGA. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2025-11-01

• Anthropic withdraws from supporting Project Maven due to restrictions on its Claude model for military use. (Source: Wikipedia)

  2026-01-01

Project Maven

Project Maven (officially Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team) is a United States Department of Defense initiative launched in 2017 to accelerate the adoption of machine learning and data integration across U.S. military intelligence workflows, specifically in intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, and reconnaissance as well as in geospatial intelligence. It initially focused on applying computer vision for processing images and videos for intelligence purposes. Currently, the program operates under the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and encompasses multiple applications across the Department of Defense spanning military operation targeting support, data integration and visualization for analysts, and training machine learning models on labeled datasets of military assets and infrastructure. It integrates data from drones, satellites, and other sensors to flag potential targets, present findings to human analysts, and relay their decisions to operational systems. The program originated under Deputy Secretary Robert O. Work after he raised concerns about China's advances in defense applications of artificial intelligence. Project leaders, Colonel Drew Cukor, USMC, and Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, framed the program as human-in-the-loop decision support inside the Department of Defense rather than as an autonomous weapons platform. Contractors supporting Maven have included Google, which withdrew in 2018 after internal protests, and follow-on integrators such as Palantir, Anduril, Amazon Web Services, and Anthropic (withdrew in 2026). The Pentagon credits Maven with providing 2024 targeting support for U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, along with locating hostile maritime assets in the Red Sea.

Web Search Results

• Palantir IR

  Project Maven was established in 2017 with the objective of delivering flagship AI capabilities to the Department of Defense. Project Maven transitioned to NGA in 2023, where it became a Program of Record called Maven. Maven provides the cloud infrastructure, software capabilities, and AI that powers CDAO’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) initiatives.

• How Project Maven Put A.I. Into the Kill Chain | The New Yorker

  “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 [...] Discover notable new fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. 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.” [...] 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

• Big Data at War: Special Operations Forces, Project Maven, and Twenty-First-Century Warfare - Modern War Institute

  Designated Project Maven, this effort’s initial objective is to automate the processing, exploitation, and dissemination of massive amounts of full-motion video collected by intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets in operational areas around the globe. With a yawning scarcity of human analysts to sort through burgeoning amounts of imagery intelligence, a combination of AI and ML presented an ideal solution. Specially trained algorithms could search for, identify, and categorize objects of interest in massive volumes of data and flag items of interest. [...] Project Maven aimed to operationalize AI in the hands of warfighters within six months. To get there, they had to build everything from scratch, from a data pipeline to algorithm development to computer power to integration on live FMV feeds to user interfaces that could display the object detections from the computer vision algorithms. This had never been done before in DoD. Project Maven started with nothing more than a vision and a willing partner in USSOCOM. [...] The extent to which Project Maven has advanced toward the goals set out in 2017, and the role the AWCFT and USSOCOM played in achieving those ends is a story that is still unfolding. But when that story is told, it will not only be about automating FMV-PED to empower SOF teams to more effectively degrade and debilitate al-Qaeda and ISIS. It will also be the story of whether Project Maven served as the springboard to prepare DoD as an institution for future wars—a transformation from a hardware-centric organization to one in which AI and ML software provides timely, relevant mission-oriented data to enable intelligence-driven decisions at speed and scale. When that happens, US commanders will be able to gain decisive advantage over current and future enemies.

• Project Maven - Wikipedia

  At the GEOINT Symposium of 2022, it was announced that Project Maven was transferred from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security to the NGA, under President Biden’s proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2023.( It became a Program of Record on 2023 November 7.( "Trey" Whitworth, vice admiral "Vice admiral (United States)"), was the director of NGA from June 2022 to November 2025.( Whitworth was initially skeptical of the program, suspecting it was incautious about the targeting principles, but later regarded it as "important work".( [...] | Nickname | Project Maven | | Formation | April 26, 2017; 8 years ago(2017-04-26) | | Founder | Robert O. Work | | Type | Department of Defense cross-functional team | | Legal status | Active | | Purpose | Adoption of machine learning and data integration for military intelligence workflows and automatic target recognition | | Key people | Col. Drew Cukor Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan VADM Frank "Trey" Whitworth | | Parent organization | National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency | [...] The program originated under Deputy Secretary Robert O. Work after he raised concerns about China's advances in defense applications of artificial intelligence. Project leaders, Colonel Drew Cukor, USMC, and Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, framed the program as human-in-the-loop decision support inside the Department of Defense rather than as an autonomous weapons platform. Contractors supporting Maven have included Google, which withdrew in 2018 after internal protests, and follow-on integrators such as Palantir, Anduril, Amazon Web Services, and Anthropic (withdrew in 2026). The Pentagon credits Maven with providing 2024 targeting support for U.S. airstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, along with locating hostile maritime assets in the Red Sea. ## Administrative history [edit]

• Pentagon seeks $2.3 billion for Maven AI battlefield system  - SpaceNews

  Maven Smart System traces its roots to Project Maven, launched in 2017 to accelerate the military’s adoption of artificial intelligence. Initially focused on analyzing drone and surveillance imagery, the effort has expanded into a broader platform that ingests and processes data from satellites, radar, and other sensors to identify objects and potential threats in near real time. Control of Maven’s geospatial intelligence functions shifted in 2022 to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which manages satellite imagery and related data streams. But the system’s reach has since extended well beyond intelligence analysis.

• Instance Of

  Q27665152