{"id":244833,"date":"2026-05-12T10:06:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-12T14:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/12\/insatiable-appetite-for-ai-maven-usage-surged-for-strikes-on-iran-pentagon-ai-chief-says\/"},"modified":"2026-05-13T01:25:11","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T05:25:11","slug":"insatiable-appetite-for-ai-maven-usage-surged-for-strikes-on-iran-pentagon-ai-chief-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/12\/insatiable-appetite-for-ai-maven-usage-surged-for-strikes-on-iran-pentagon-ai-chief-says\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Insatiable appetite’ for AI: Maven usage surged for strikes on Iran, Pentagon AI chief says"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘Insatiable appetite’ for AI: Maven usage surged for strikes on Iran, Pentagon AI chief says<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/breakingdefense.com\/2026\/05\/insatiable-appetite-for-ai-maven-usage-surged-for-strikes-on-iran-pentagon-ai-chief-says\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-05-12 10:06:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: breakingdefense.com<\/a><\/p>\n

WASHINGTON \u2014 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\u2019s Maven Smart System (MSS).<\/p>\n

\u201cOperation Epic Fury leveraged Palantir\u2019s Maven Smart System in order to conduct strike missions across the entire battle space, 13,000 targets in 38 days,\u201d the Pentagon\u2019s Chief Digital & AI Officer (CDAO), Cameron Stanley, told the SCSP AI+Expo Thursday, adding that troops have shown an \u201cinsatiable appetite\u201d for the tech. \u201c[AI tools] allow us to take all of this data, synthesize the data, and make better decisions, faster, on the battlefield.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

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 \u201ctokens,\u201d the individual mathematical operations underlying generative AI, peak daily usage rose 4,425 percent.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 someone using AI to write code, for instance \u2014 can burn up to a quarter-million tokens a day.<\/p>\n

From its humble beginnings as \u201ca small cross functional team of about 45 people in the Pentagon, [Maven] has exploded into the best AI-enabled C2 capability on the planet,\u201d Stanley told the SCSP conference.<\/p>\n

So what is all this activity actually producing? The Pentagon declined to provide specific examples from the Iran conflict, but…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘Insatiable appetite’ for AI: Maven usage surged for strikes on Iran, Pentagon AI chief says…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":244836,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/breakingdefense.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/13\/2026\/05\/260512_troop_computer_closeup_9239867-e1778593015781-1024x577.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20,19],"class_list":["post-244833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-generative-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244833"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=244833"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244833\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":244838,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/244833\/revisions\/244838"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/244836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=244833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=244833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=244833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}