david jeans
NEW YORK, March 20 (Reuters) – U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg said in a letter to Pentagon leaders that Palantir’s Maven artificial intelligence system will become an official project of record, a move that will lock in the U.S. military’s long-term use of Palantir’s weapons targeting technology.
In a March 9 letter to senior Pentagon leaders and U.S. military commanders, Feinberg said the Maven intelligence system embedded in Palantir will provide warfighters with “the latest tools needed to detect, deter and control our adversaries across all domains.”
The decision, which was not previously reported, is expected to take effect at the end of the current fiscal year, which ends in September, according to the letter reviewed by Reuters.
Maven is a command and control software platform that analyzes battlefield data and identifies targets. It is already the primary artificial intelligence operating system for the U.S. military, which has conducted thousands of targeted strikes against Iran in the past three weeks.
Designating Maven as a program of record will streamline its adoption across all branches of the military and provide stable, long-term funding, Feinberg said.
The memo orders the transfer of oversight of Maven from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to the Pentagon’s Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office within 30 days. Future contracts with Palantir will be handled by the Army, the letter said.
“We must invest now with a focus on deepening the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) across the joint force and making AI-driven decision-making a cornerstone of our strategy,” Feinberg wrote.
Palantir and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Palantir’s status at Pentagon further grows
Feinberg’s order is a major win for Palantir, which has secured a growing number of contracts with the U.S. government, including a deal worth up to $10 billion with the U.S. Army announced last summer. The awards have helped the company’s stock price double over the past year, boosting its market value to nearly $360 billion.
Maven can quickly analyze large amounts of data from satellites, drones, radars, sensors and intelligence reports and use artificial intelligence to automatically identify potential threats or targets such as enemy military vehicles, buildings and weapons inventories.
At a Palantir event earlier this month, Cameron Stanley, the head of the Pentagon’s Artificial Intelligence Office, demonstrated how the company’s Maven platform could be used to target weapons in the Middle East, showing screenshots of heat maps from the Maven platform.
“When we started this work, it literally took several hours to accomplish what you just saw,” he said, according to a YouTube video the company uploaded last week.
A United Nations panel of experts has warned that AI weapons targeting without human intervention poses ethical, legal and security risks because the AI can inadvertently detect biases in the data sets used to train it.
Palantir says its software does not make fatal decisions and that humans are still responsible for selecting and approving targets.
Palantir develops artificial intelligence systems for the Pentagon’s Project Maven, which began in 2017 as a drone image labeling project. In 2024, the Pentagon awarded Palantir a contract worth up to $480 million. That year, Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar told the House Armed Services Committee that Maven had “tens of thousands” of users and urged Congress to provide more funding. In May 2025, the Pentagon increased the contract cap to $1.3 billion.
As previously reported by Reuters, one potential complication for deeper adoption of Maven is the software’s use of the Claude AI tool made by Anthropic. Humans have recently been deemed a supply chain risk by the Pentagon amid a months-long dispute over the safety guardrails of artificial intelligence.
(Reporting by David Jeans; Editing by Joe Block and Cynthia Osterman)
