‘Insatiable appetite’ for AI: Maven usage surged for strikes on Iran, Pentagon AI chief says
‘Insatiable appetite’ for AI: Maven usage surged for strikes on Iran, Pentagon AI chief says
Publish Date: 2026-05-12 10:06:00
Source Domain: breakingdefense.com
WASHINGTON — Pentagon planners and military staffs made unprecedented use of artificial intelligence during the 38-day air war against Iran, according to officials and newly disclosed usage figures for the DoD’s Maven Smart System (MSS).
“Operation Epic Fury leveraged Palantir’s Maven Smart System in order to conduct strike missions across the entire battle space, 13,000 targets in 38 days,” the Pentagon’s Chief Digital & AI Officer (CDAO), Cameron Stanley, told the SCSP AI+Expo Thursday, adding that troops have shown an “insatiable appetite” for the tech. “[AI tools] allow us to take all of this data, synthesize the data, and make better decisions, faster, on the battlefield.”
MSS is an AI tool suite that evolved from the original Project Maven experiment to a multi-purpose military planning tool built by contractor Palantir. (A separate offshoot of Maven is run by the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency.)
During Epic Fury, MSS saw unclassified usage surge by 38 percent and classified usage by 89 percent, a Pentagon spokesperson told Breaking Defense, measuring month-to-month. Measured by “tokens,” the individual mathematical operations underlying generative AI, peak daily usage rose 4,425 percent.
At one point, the spokesperson told Breaking Defense, daily usage hit approximately 20 billion tokens. For comparison, in civilian contexts, a single question-and-answer with a chatbot can require several hundred tokens, while an individual power user with a high-level paid account — someone using AI to write code, for instance — can burn up to a quarter-million tokens a day.
From its humble beginnings as “a small cross functional team of about 45 people in the Pentagon, [Maven] has exploded into the best AI-enabled C2 capability on the planet,” Stanley told the SCSP conference.
So what is all this activity actually producing? The Pentagon declined to provide specific examples from the Iran conflict, but…
