At Palantir's AIPCon 9 conference in Maryland on March 13, the Pentagon's chief digital and AI officer gave a live demo of Maven Smart System — reducing the military's entire targeting workflow to three mouse clicks.

"Left click, right click, left click," said Cameron Stanley, the Department of Defense's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, describing the process of closing a kill chain inside Maven. The system has consolidated eight or nine separate tools into a single platform for identifying, selecting, and acting on military targets.

From 2,000 Officers to 20

Palantir architect Chad Wahlquist described the impact directly: "Normally we would have 2,000 intelligence officers trying to do targeting. Now that's 20 — and they're doing it in rapid succession."

Stanley said Maven has unified the full process: "We've gone from identifying the target to coming up with a course of action to actioning that target, all from one system. This is revolutionary."

Palantir's chief commercial officer Ted Mabrey confirmed the company is currently supporting Operation Epic Fury, the US's ongoing strikes on Iran.

The Claude Connection

WIRED reported this week that Anthropic's Claude serves as the reasoning engine inside Maven's AI chatbot interface — the same AI that Anthropic has refused to license for autonomous weapons use. That refusal led the Pentagon to designate Anthropic a "supply chain risk," triggering a federal lawsuit filed last week.

Google Walked This Road Before

Maven launched in 2016 as the military's "third offset" — the speed and accuracy of AI-assisted command decisions. Google was the original partner but quit in 2018 after employee protests. Palantir took over the contract and has expanded the system ever since.