IC Technology — 2026-03-31

Project Maven Now Has 25,000 Active Users Across US Military as Pentagon Investigates AI Role in Iranian School Strike

Bloomberg journalist Katrina Manson revealed that the Maven Smart System, the Pentagon's AI targeting platform run by Palantir using Anthropic Claude, now has over 25,000 active accounts across US military commands and is on track to become a formal program of record by September. The system has been central to the Iran campaign, helping identify 11,000 targets in 32 days. The Pentagon is separately investigating whether Maven contributed to the February 28 strike on an Iranian girls school that killed over 170 people, an incident traced to outdated intelligence in the targeting chain.

Analysis
The 25,000-user figure and pending program-of-record status mark Maven's transition from experimental tool to institutional infrastructure, a shift with implications for IC oversight, since formal programs are subject to different congressional reporting requirements than experimental projects. The school strike investigation is the first operational test of AI accountability in a live conflict: if Maven contributed to targeting a site with outdated intelligence, it exposes the speed-accuracy tradeoff in AI-accelerated kill chains.

2 sources

The AI War on Iran: Project Maven, a Secretive Palantir-Run System, Helps Pentagon Pick Bomb Targets - Democracy Now
The Iran war highlights the creeping use of AI in warfare - Chatham House