Meet the Gods of AI Warfare | WIRED

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The rise of AI warfare speaks to the biggest moral and practical question there is: Who—or what—gets to decide to take a human life? And who bears that cost? In 2018, more than 3,000 Google workers protested the company’s involvement in “the business of war” after finding out the company was part of Project Maven, then a nascent Pentagon effort to use computer vision to rifle through copious video footage taken in America’s overseas drone wars. They feared Project Maven’s AI could one day be used for lethal targeting.

In my yearslong effort to uncover the full story of Project Maven for my book, Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare, I learned that is exactly what happened, and that the undertaking was just as controversial inside the Pentagon. But that didn’t slow its forward march. Today, the tool known as Maven Smart System is being used in US operations against Iran. How the US military’s top brass moved from skepticism about the use of AI in war to true believers has a lot to do with a Marine colonel named Drew Cukor.

In early September 2024, during the cocktail hour at a private retreat for tech investors and defense leaders, Vice Admiral Frank “Trey” Whitworth found his way to Drew Cukor. Now Project Maven’s founding leader and his skeptical successor were standing face-to-face.

Three years earlier, Whitworth had been the Pentagon’s top military official for intelligence, advising the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and running one of the most sensitive and potentially lethal parts of any military process: targeting. Colonel Cukor, an intense Marine intelligence officer described to me by one of his seniors as “a one-man wrecking ball” who took on military orthodoxy, defense bureaucracy and the pursuit of AI warfare to his own cost, was wrapping up his five years as Project Maven’s chief.

In a meeting so tense some present had squirmed, I learned that Whitworth—an exacting former SEAL Team 6 intelligence director who sat on the military targeting committee for nearly two decades—had drilled Cukor about whether Maven and its use of AI was skipping crucial steps in the targeting process, moving too fast and bending rules.

“Tell me about what happens after the bad drop when we go through a congressional [hearing] and we’re getting hard questions?” Whitworth demanded.

He worried about record-keeping and accountability when it came to involving AI in targeting, and he expressed strong doubt that Project Maven was worth the billion dollars Congress had already spent on it, much of which had gone to Silicon Valley’s controversial upstart darling: Palantir.

When Whitworth took charge of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in June 2022 and became responsible for the future of Project Maven following Cukor’s departure, he still worried that Project Maven was overpriced, overhyped, and incautious about the targeting principles he most cared about. Whitworth could have shut the program down in a heartbeat. The future of Cukor’s baby looked increasingly in doubt. “We were all very concerned,” Cukor told me in one of our weekly afternoon talks over the course of more than a year. “Trey was not a friend.”

I would come to see Cukor as a leading historical figure in a war that hasn’t happened yet. That seemed to be what almost everyone to do with Project Maven thought, whether they feted or hated him. Alex Karp, Palantir’s chief executive, referred approvingly to Cukor as “crazy Cukor” and called him “the founding father of AI targeting.” After his showdown with Whitworth, Cukor told others: “I will either be famous or live in infamy.”

But now, more than two years into leading the NGA and more than two years into Russia’s war against Ukraine, rather than abandoning Maven, Whitworth praised the program. “Drew, this is important work,” he assured Cukor at the September 2024 event. Maven Smart System—the software platform built by Palantir that brought together disparate battlefield and other data on a digital map and displayed AI detections that could be deployed in targeting—was adaptable. It could integrate with any system and become new with each software update. It could do what people wanted.

Cukor described the vice admiral as methodical, saying that Whitworth had just reasoned his way to endorsing Maven. Cukor thought Whitworth had come to understand why the US needed to bring AI into the targeting cycle. (The portion of Maven’s $250 million annual budget that went to NGA may also have helped, he thought.) “It speaks to his character, honestly,” said Cukor. “It wasn’t an apology as much as a formal recognition. We didn’t hug, but it was an important conversation.”

Under Whitworth, Maven would have its coming-out party, emerging from years of secrecy tightly maintained under Cukor in the wake of the Google protests. Six months earlier, deciding to shoot comprised the short