Three weeks into a shooting war with Iran, the Pentagon has decided to make its AI targeting backbone permanent.

Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg signed a memo on March 9 designating Palantir’s Maven Smart System as an official program of record — bureaucratic language for a seismic commitment. The designation locks in long-term funding, streamlines adoption across every branch of the military, and ensures Maven is no longer a pilot or an experiment. It is infrastructure.

The timing is not subtle. U.S. and Israeli forces launched Operation Epic Fury on February 28, striking nearly 1,000 targets in Iran within the first 24 hours. Maven was already in the room, fusing satellite imagery, drone feeds, radar data, and intercepted communications into a single interface. The system compressed what the Pentagon calls the “kill chain” — the sequence from identifying a target to striking it — from hours to minutes.

The Machine in the Loop

Maven’s value proposition is consolidation. Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and AI Officer, has described it as replacing eight or nine separate intelligence systems with one platform. A Palantir architect, Chad Wahlquist, put the efficiency gains more starkly: workflows that once required 2,000 intelligence officers can now be handled by 20.

The system uses computer vision models to scan satellite and drone imagery, automatically flagging potential targets — vehicles, weapons stockpiles, buildings. Human operators still make the final call on strikes, according to the Pentagon. But the machine decides what they see first.

More than 20,000 active users now operate Maven across 35 military tools and combatant commands, according to Vice Admiral Frank Whitworth, director of the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. That user base has more than doubled since January alone — a growth curve driven by war.

$1.3 Billion and Counting

The financial trajectory tracks the operational one. Palantir’s original Maven contract, signed in May 2024, was worth $480 million over five years. By May 2025, the Pentagon raised the ceiling to $1.3 billion through 2029, citing “significant influx in demand.” The program-of-record designation virtually guarantees further expansion.

Palantir’s stock, which has roughly doubled over the past year, traded around $150 per share on the day of the Reuters report. The company’s market capitalisation sits near $360 billion. CEO Alex Karp has been blunt about the company’s posture. “If you’re expecting us not to support warfighters once they’re in battle, you got the wrong company,” he said.

Feinberg’s memo orders oversight of Maven to transfer from the NGA to the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office within 30 days, centralising control over the platform that is, in practice, already running the targeting workflow for an active campaign.

The Feinberg Question

Feinberg himself is a figure worth scrutiny. The billionaire co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management — a private equity firm with deep defense-sector investments, including former ownership of military contractor DynCorp — was confirmed as Deputy Secretary of Defense in March 2025 on a 59–40 vote. Senator Elizabeth Warren flagged his entangled financial interests ahead of his confirmation hearing. Cerberus received billions in Pentagon-adjacent contracts during the years Feinberg controlled it.

Feinberg filed divestment paperwork, but it included clauses retaining a financial relationship with Cerberus. He is now the man signing memos that direct billions toward defense technology firms. The revolving door between Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and the Pentagon has never spun faster.

The Anthropic Wrinkle

One complication lurks beneath the surface. Maven’s AI stack incorporates Claude, the large language model built by Anthropic, for processing intelligence data and supporting targeting analysis. On March 1 — one day before Epic Fury’s major strike phase — the Trump administration designated Anthropic a “supply chain risk to national security” and ordered federal agencies to phase out Claude within six months.

CENTCOM used Claude for targeting analysis during the strikes regardless, since the phase-out clock had not yet run. The Pentagon is now formalising a program built partly on technology it has simultaneously flagged as a security risk. How that contradiction resolves will shape Maven’s next chapter.

What This Means

Peacetime procurement takes years. War compresses everything — timelines, oversight, caution. Maven went from pilot project to billion-dollar contract to program of record in under two years, a pace that would have been unthinkable before February 28.

The strike on a girls’ school near Minab, which killed over 160 people, has already drawn scrutiny to Maven’s targeting workflow. The Pentagon maintains humans made the final decision. Critics argue the system’s speed is precisely the problem — that compressing deliberation into seconds leaves less room for the judgment calls that prevent catastrophic errors.

This is the moment defense-tech advocates always promised: AI at the centre of American warfighting, proven in combat, blessed by procurement. It is also the moment critics always feared.

Sources