According to Schuyler Moore, Chief Technology Officer of US Central Command, the US deploys “Project Maven” in the Middle East as AI warfare unfolds.

Do you recall how thousands of Google workers objected to the Pentagon contract known as “Project Maven” in 2018 because it employed article intelligence technology to examine surveillance footage captured by drones?

According to Schuyler Moore, chief technology officer of US Central Command, which oversees US military operations in the Middle East, the US military used the same technology six years after Google declined to renew its Pentagon contract for AI work to quell an internal uprising to identify targets across the Middle East in fighter jet bombing raids earlier this month. Moore spoke with Bloomberg.

To prevent tensions between Iran and Arab governments, US military bases are being deactivated in the Persian Gulf, including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

In an interview, Moore stated, “We’ve been using computer vision to identify where there might be threats.”

“We’ve certainly had more opportunities to target in the last 60 to 90 days,” she said, adding that the US is currently searching the area for “an awful lot” of rocket launchers.

Some of the most compelling proof that the US military is utilizing AI targeting systems to locate possible strike zones can be found in Moore’s remarks. She pointed out that experiments utilizing drone or satellite imagery had gone on long after Google abandoned the project.

Moore disclosed that US forces in the Middle East have been testing AI targeting systems using a combination of satellites and other data sources and have performed exercises using the technology over the past year. Moore is based at Central Command, or Centcom, headquarters in Tampa, Florida.

“October 7th, everything changed,” she said, adding, “We immediately shifted into high gear and a much higher operational tempo than we had previously.” She noted the shift from exercises to real-life missions was “a pretty seamless shift” with Project Maven. 

Moore did stress that Project Maven’s AI powers do not automatically confirm and exclude targets—rather, they only identify possible targets.

According to a different Bloomberg report:

“A growing number of US military officers predict that AI will transform the way America and its enemies make war, ranking it alongside the radio and machine gun in its potential to revolutionize combat.” 

According to insiders who spoke with Bloomberg, Palantir Technologies is creating the central data-fusion platform for Project Maven, with assistance from Amazon Web Services, ECS Federal, L3Harris Technologies, Maxar Technologies, Microsoft, and Sierra Nevada.