GoKawiilThe 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.
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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.
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