Palantir Wins $100 Million U.S. Contract for AI Targeting Tech

(Bloomberg) -- Palantir Technologies Inc. has won a $100 million contract that will extend access to artificial intelligence targeting tools to more US military personnel, giving them access to the company’s digital warfare platform.

The platform, known as Maven Smart System, helps create a picture of the same battlefield on thousands of digital screens simultaneously. It draws on US intelligence data and uses computer-vision algorithms and AI-enabled software from other companies to help make sense of a situation and to find adversaries. The US military has used the system to help identify for air strikes in the Middle East this year, Bloomberg has reported. 

Shannon Clark, head of defense growth at Palantir, said the contract would extend access to Maven Smart System to all five US military services — the Army, Air Force, Marine Corps, Navy and Space Force — expanding the platform to tens of thousands more service members.  

Selected units in specific locations so far have had access to the system, she said. Palantir in May won a $480 million contract to extend Maven Smart System to combatant commands, which run military operations in specific locations. 

Maven, which relies on multiple contractors and AI providers alongside Palantir, started as a project in 2017 and is now a program of record mostly run by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. The Defense Department has released little information about how Maven is used operationally. Bloomberg has reported the US has relied on it to offer targeting support to Ukraine, as well as for American operations in Yemen, Iraq and Sudan. 

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US defense officials have defended the department’s use of computer vision and other machine-learning algorithms to inform such targeting decisions, arguing that it ultimately falls to humans to make decisions about battlefield actions. Some experts argue the system could encourage human operators to give undue trust to such machines, however. An advisory body convened by the United Nations on Thursday called on countries to limit military use of AI to prevent human rights violations and a possible new arms race. 

The contract was announced by the Defense Department on Wednesday in a daily notice saying the Palo Alto, California-based company has been awarded a five-year contract to supply user licenses for its Maven Smart System AI tool along with related software support and hardware, with a top value of $99.8 million, according to the announcement.

Intelligence analysts, operators and other military personnel in remote locations will now be able to access the system, connecting up information on the battlefield with Pentagon headquarters at the same time, Clark said. 

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A spokesperson for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency didn’t comment on the contract but said NGA is continuously working on expanding Maven to all the services and all of the military commands. 

Both Maven and Maven Smart System are important for a long-running Pentagon effort to connect the military’s sensors and weapons systems across the world, which it has yet to realize. The NGA spokesperson said their agency is working closely with the Pentagon’s chief digital and AI office on the effort.