U.S. Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg said in a letter to Pentagon leaders that Palantir's Maven artificial intelligence system will become an official project of record, a move that will ensure the long-term use of Palantir's weapons targeting technology in the U.S. military.
In a March 9 letter to senior Pentagon leaders and U.S. military commanders, Feinberg said the Maven intelligence system embedded in Palantir will provide warfighters with "the latest tools needed to detect, deter and control adversaries across all domains."
The decision is expected to take effect before the end of the current fiscal year, which ends in September, the letter said. The letter was reviewed by the media and had not previously been reported.
Maven is a command and control software platform that can analyze battlefield data and identify targets. It is already the primary artificial intelligence operating system for the US military, which has carried out thousands of targeted strikes against Iran in the past three weeks.
Feinberg said designating Maven as a project of record will streamline its adoption across the Army and provide stable, long-term funding.
The memo orders the transfer of oversight of Maven from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency to the Pentagon's Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office within 30 days. The letter stated that future contracts with Palantir will be the responsibility of the Army.
“It is imperative that we focus investments now to deepen the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) across the joint force and establish AI-assisted decision-making as a cornerstone of our strategy,” Feinberg wrote.
Palantir and the Pentagon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Palantir's further rise at the Pentagon
Feinberg's order is a major victory for Palantir, which has secured a growing number of contracts with the U.S. government, including a contract worth up to $10 billion with the U.S. Army announced last summer. The contracts have doubled the company's stock price over the past year, giving it a market value of nearly $360 billion.
Maven can quickly analyze massive amounts of data from satellites, drones, radars, sensors and intelligence reports and use artificial intelligence to automatically identify potential threats or targets such as enemy military vehicles, buildings and weapons depots.
At a Palantir event earlier this month, Cameron Stanley, the Pentagon official who leads its Office of Artificial Intelligence, demonstrated in a presentation how the company's Maven platform could be used to target weapons in the Middle East. He also showed screenshots of heat maps from the Maven platform.
"When we started doing this, it would have taken hours to do what you just saw," he said, according to a YouTube video the company uploaded last week.
A U.N. expert panel has warned that AI targeting weapons without human intervention poses ethical, legal and security risks because the AI could inadvertently acquire biases from the data sets used to train it.
Palantir says its software does not make fatal decisions and that humans are still responsible for selecting and approving targets.
The artificial intelligence system developed by Palantir serves the Pentagon's "Project Maven" project, which began in 2017 as a drone image tagging program. In 2024, the Pentagon awarded Palantir a contract worth up to $480 million. That same year, Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar told the House Armed Services Committee that Maven had "tens of thousands" of users and urged Congress to provide more funding. In May 2025, the Pentagon increased the contract limit to $1.3 billion.
Reuters previously reported that a potential complication for deeper adoption of Maven is the software's use of the Cloud artificial intelligence tool produced by Anthropic. Anthropic was recently designated a supply chain risk by the Pentagon, and debate over the AI's security safeguards has raged for months.