Project Maven began in 2017 as a tool to scour footage from drones Devon Bistarkey, Defense Innovation Unit Project MavenKatrina Manson, W.W. Norton Israel’s military is using artificial intelligence to identify targets in Gaza, the US is doing the same in Iran and Ukraine pushes on with smart drones. AI war is not the future of conflict, it is the present. Unpacking global policies on the use of AI by militaries – the potential benefits, pitfalls and murky ethics – will fill books for decades to come. But that’s not what Katrina Manson is setting out to do in Project Maven. Instead, she uses interviews with over 200 people to tell the story of the US military’s journey into AI warfare – or one of them, since there are 800 AI projects hidden in the Pentagon. In 2017, Project Maven was launched to build a tool to scour footage from drones and extract useful intelligence – the drones had collected more data than any human could interpret. Maven had a rocky start, says Manson. The …