“…Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg, who is not a career Pentagon official but the billionaire co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, signed a letter on March 9 directing that Palantir’s Maven AI system become an official program of record across the US military.
Corruption is clearly the problem.
The order moves oversight from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to the Pentagon’s Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office, the same office whose director Cameron Stanley demonstrated Maven’s targeting capabilities at a Palantir corporate event earlier this month.
Program of record means Maven gets its own budget line, its own acquisition pathway, and the kind of institutional permanence that survives administrations. Canceling a program of record requires political will that almost never materializes. This is how you make a vendor relationship into infrastructure.
The timing is obvious. Three weeks into a war with Iran. Thousands of strikes executed through Maven. And now the formalization. The war that Palantir wanted, created the dependency, and the dependency justifies the formalization.
(…)
Feinberg’s letter orders the transition completed by September. Future contracting goes through the Army, which already has the $10 billion deal with Palantir in place. Oversight goes to the office that already functions as Palantir’s in-house champion.
The company that assessed the threat, justified the war, targeted the strikes, and profits from the continuation now has permanent program-of-record status, directed by a billionaire from the same investor class as the company’s founders.
The corruption is so obvious, history will not be kind to Palantir…”
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Pentagon to adopt Palantir AI as core US military system, memo says
“…Feinberg’s order is a significant win for Palantir, which has landed a growing stream of contracts with the U.S. government, including a deal announced last summer with the U.S. Army worth up to $10 billion. Those awards have helped double the company’s stock price in the past year, lifting its market value to nearly $360 billion.
Maven can rapidly analyze 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…”