Pentagon to adopt Palantir AI as core US military system: Memo

PALANTIR RISES FURTHER AT THE PENTAGON

Feinberg’s order is a significant win for Palantir, which has landed a growing stream of contracts with the US government, including a deal announced last summer with the US Army worth up to US$10 billion. Those awards have helped double the company’s stock price in the past year, lifting its market value to nearly US$360 billion.

Maven can rapidly analyse huge amounts of data from satellites, drones, radars, sensors and intelligence reports, and use AI to automatically identify potential threats or targets, like enemy military vehicles, buildings and weapons stockpiles.

During a presentation at a Palantir event earlier this month, Pentagon official Cameron Stanley, who leads its AI office, demonstrated how the company’s Maven platform could be used for weapons targeting in the Middle East, and he showed heat map screenshots from the Maven platform. 

“When we started this, it literally took hours to do what you just saw,” he said, according to a YouTube video uploaded by the company last week. 

United Nations expert panels have warned AI weapons targeting without human intervention raises ethical, legal and security risks since AI picks up inadvertent biases from the data sets used to train it.  

Palantir says its software does not make lethal decisions and humans remain responsible for selecting and approving targets.

Palantir developed its AI system to serve the Pentagon’s Project Maven, which began as a drone-imagery labeling program in 2017. In 2024, the Pentagon awarded Palantir a contract worth up to US$480 million. That year, Palantir’s 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 ceiling to US$1.3 billion.

One potential complication in deeper Maven adoption is the software’s use of the Anthropic-made Claude AI tool, Reuters previously reported. Anthropic was recently deemed a supply chain risk by the Pentagon, amid a months-long spat over safety guardrails surrounding the AI.