More than a month into the US’s and Israel’s illegal war on Iran, its devastating consequences continue to unfold and reverberate around the world.
Crucially, this war is AI-powered, and to resist it, we need to understand how it operates. Euractiv’s piece provides a brief, accessible primer on the US’s main AI warfare system used in Iran: Project Maven.
Israel’s use of military AI in its genocide in Gaza is widely known. Systems ranging from Lavender, an automated strike target generator, to Where’s Daddy, a system used to determine when people marked for killing were home, meaning the structures were ready to be bombed.
Euractive describes the equivalent systems used by the US in Iran, Project Maven, as “both the air traffic control base of battle and its cockpit.” It detects troop movements and identifies targets for airstrikes, including presenting a full “targeting workflow, weighing available assets and presenting a commander with options.”
[Project Maven is an] AI assistant targeting and battlefield management system that has vastly accelerated what is known in war-making as the kill chain – the process from initial detection to destruction.
Euractive also highlights the project’s longer history, launched in 2017, aimed at analysing drone footage. As we wrote last month, Project Maven is currently powered by Anthropic and Palantir. However, OpenAI, Google, and X will soon take Anthropic’s place, as the latter objected to the use of its AI for target generation.
This is not the first time tech workers have pushed back against Project Maven. Back in 2018, Google was Project Maven’s original AI contractor. It did not renew its contract and made an explicit policy to not engage in military AI after an intense wave of protest: more than 3,000 people signed an open letter and several staff members resigned. However, Google silently reneged on this policy and is now in the mix to replace Anthropic. Google’s turnaround is part of a wider shift in big tech towards weapons and warfare.
For a more extensive analysis, see the book Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare by Katrina Manson, the Democracy Now segment of the book or the WIRED interview with the author.
See: AI at war: Five things to know about Project Maven at Euractiv.
Image by 0xReflektor, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license.
