Project Maven (a Marine Colonel, His Team, And The Dawn Of Ai Warfare)

By (author) Manson Katrina
Short description/annotation:
Longlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award 2026 The dramatic story of the secretive decade-long Pentagon campaign to deliver America into the age of AI warfare
Description:
In 2017, a small crew gathered in a windowless Pentagon room to put AI at the heart of how America makes war. Led by Drew Cukor, an unyielding Marine Corps colonel driven by the deaths of US troops and the prospect of war with an AI-equipped China, the Project Maven team raced to send AI into combat, igniting controversy and forever changing the US military. Summoning the mayhem of a tech startup, the Maven team wrestled Pentagon bureaucrats and each other. They enlisted an initially reluctant Silicon Valley, supercharged the growth of Palantir, and sent algorithms made by Amazon, Microsoft and others into hot wars. Maven fielded technology to identify targets at speed and scale, developed AI-infused command systems, and learned where AI fails. The prospect of machines making independent decisions about life and death alarmed members of the US military across all ranks and the project sparked a revolt amongst thousands of tech workers at Google. Yet today, Maven’s AI-enabled systems operate in every branch of the US military and its lessons are folded into developing autonomous technology set to be on the front lines of future war. Project Maven and its legacy sit at the intersection of colliding trends: America’s insecurity about declining global power, the technological revolution driving AI into every aspect of society, the dominance of Big Tech, all-encompassing surveillance, and the ambitions of China’s growing military. As the second Trump administration pours money into military AI and autonomy while the UN Secretary-General clamours for a ban on killer robots, this book investigates whether AI will improve accuracy and save lives or if a fundamentally unreliable black-box technology will unleash mistakes and atrocities at scale. Drawing on more than 200 interviews with insiders and opponents, this compelling narrative tells the definitive story of how AI warfare, once the stuff of apocalyptic science fiction, has become a reality.
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"The best book on AI and war I have read for many years"
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"[O]ne of the most important books on war and technology in many years... [A] scintillating account."
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"Deeply researched and breezily written."
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"[Project Maven] tells a hugely important story that the Pentagon, for one, would have preferred to keep under wraps. Manson has done a wonderful job of drawing back the curtain on a chilling battlefield development with consequences for us all."
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"[A] lively and at times terrifying book… Project Maven offers a fascinating case study in military innovation."
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"An unflaggingly well-reported and well-sourced account of the ongoing reconfiguration of the U.S. armed forces for a new technological era"
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"Could this book be any more timely? […] This looks to be fascinating and compelling stuff—but you may need a strong stomach"
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"It is scarily fascinating to read about the US military’s journey into AI warfare in this deeply-researched book… We need to ensure the power granted by AI weapons is treated with the gravity it deserves, but Manson tells us a chilling story that suggests the reality is otherwise."
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"Killer robots have long been a hot topic for feverish science fiction writers. But as Manson explores in her impressively researched book on the Pentagon’s Project Maven, we are rapidly sleepwalking into a world of automated killing."
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"A tour de force of reporting"
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"A well-tol