Foreign policy and defense correspondent Katrina Manson’s impressive new book Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare (2026) has put the ethics of AI warfare directly in the spotlight, which is good. Although ethical issues surrounding the use of AI to wage war have been considered in detail by many observers over the years, such warfare is now a reality rather than only a theory, necessitating reconsideration of the topic.
Project Maven is largely about (a) the unique personality and skills of maverick Marine Colonel Drew Cukor, and (b) the bureaucracy of the American military establishment which, like most bureaucracies, is often resistant to change. Over a period of several years, particularly 2017 to 2021, Cukor more than anyone else pushed the military to adopt AI warfare tools developed largely by Palantir Technologies. Cukor’s driven and often abrasive personality worked both for him and against him in his quest. Any student of management theory could learn a lot from a case study of the military’s processes that led to a halting adoption of Project Maven, which Cukor has called “the Defense Department’s effort to embed AI into the world’s most complex and consequential operational workflows.” Project Maven is typically integrated into Palantir’s Maven Smart System (MSS) (which uses Anthropic’s Claude AI) to quickly identify targets, accelerating the “kill chain”—the steps from initial detection to destruction.
In this blog post, we wish to emphasize just five important points from this book that are relevant to the ethics of AI warfare where, as Manson points out, “the biggest moral and practical question …is: Who—or what—gets to decide to take a human life?”
1. Killer robots and AI warfare are no longer just science fiction.
They are already here, so discussions of ethical guardrails for such warfare are no longer a matter of idle speculation by science fiction writers and philosophy professors but a pressing priority for AI companies, for members of the military, for policy makers, and for all the rest of us.
Project Maven ostensibly was to use computer vision to pierce the fog of war. But Cukor always had in mind bringing AI directly to the battlefield, including using it not just to locate and target enemies but also to literally pull the trigger, often with only passing participation from human beings. Among other new AI tools, Manson reports that the U.S. has “an aerial drone that could, once activated, fly under its own accord, pick out its own moving maritime target, and fire at it too. America [is] producing killer robots.”
Because of the vast powers of AI targeting systems that already exists, Manson emphasizes: “The US will have to define carefully the relevant use cases, guardrails, and doctrines if it wants to stick to the Geneva Convention and avoid shooting civilians and its own allied forces.”
2. Specific examples of AI’s failings in warfare highlight the urgency for ethical analysis.
In the first 100 hours of the Iran war, the U.S. hit more targets than in the entire first six months of the US Coalition’s bombing campaign targeting ISIS. Unfortunately, many civilians have been killed, including (quite likely) the 168 children in the Iranian school infamously bombed at the very beginning of the war. In Ukraine, MSS targeting software provided images that were off by as much as 50 meters. Manson notes other failures.
3. Despite misgivings about AI’s limitations, the pressure on the military to adopt and use powerful new tools can be nearly irresistible.
As noted, much of Manson’s tale describes the typical reluctance to adapt and evolve that one sees in bureaucracies like the military…. the proverbial desire for a faster horse rather than a revolutionary new form of transportation. However, when soldiers at any rank see AI results that are “eye-watering” in the way they “make war go faster and bigger” and enable such a seamless military success as the Maduro kidnapping, ethical misgivings may well fade away.
4. Current U.S. leadership is ill-disposed to let moral considerations slow down the adoption and use of AI war tools.
President Trump has made it clear that he feels that his “own morality” is the only limit to his global power. “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth has written that he has little use for the Geneva Convention. With this tone being set at the top, it is not surprising that Manson quotes a former member of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) as saying he was worried that “Pentagon leadership was blurring rules of engagement and had ‘completely grayed’ the lines that special operators [of killer drones] used to understand.” Thus, these new, fearsome weapons of AI warfare are being created, deployed, and used in a revolutionary new manner that is ripe for abuse.
5. An international treaty limiting the spread and use of AI warfare tools seems necessary and yet also extremely unlikely.
Former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, is quoted by Manson as saying that “AI warfare could endanger humanity.” Russia has intentionally and repeatedly targeted Ukrainian civilians with AI-guided drones. Both the U.S. and (especially) Israel have killed many civilians with Maven Project AI tools in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. China and the U.S. are building toward a confrontation over the status of Taiwan in which AI weaponry would likely be decisive, says Manson.
Experts have warned the U.N. that “current frameworks fail to address the ‘profound risks’ that AI-assisted targeting like Project Maven pose to international humanitarian law and human judgment in targeting.” (Shabibi & Croft)
China and the U.S. thus find themselves in a situation where both could benefit by negotiating treaties that other countries would join with the goal of limiting the spread of AI weaponry just as Russia and the U.S., after years of negotiation, largely defused the worldwide nuclear arms race that the two of them had sparked.
This seems desirable but unlikely. First, the current U.S. President’s modus operandi is to destroy international cooperative agreements by the droves rather than enter into such agreements. Second, even if the U.S. president were not hostile to cooperative agreements, given the strongly competitive positioning of China and the U.S., any serious negotiation any time soon would seem unlikely. Manson points out that in the decidedly unproductive negotiations regarding AI and autonomous weapons systems that have occurred at the United Nations in the last 20 years or so, the U.S. has focused primarily on maintaining its primacy in AI technology development and China has focused primarily on slowing U.S. technological progress.
At the end of the day, a thorough reading of Project Maven leaves one a bit discouraged regarding the prospects for harnessing the military potential of AI for good and limiting its damage to moral wartime norms.
Sources:
Peter Asaro, “Autonomous Weapons and the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence,” in Ethics of Artificial Intelligence (S. Matthew Liao, ed. 2020).
Drew Cukor, “I Helped Build the Pentagon’s AI Transformation. Corporate America is Making Every Mistake We Almost Made,” Fortune, May 11, 2026, at https://fortune.com/2026/05/11/drew-cukor-project-maven-ai-adoption-china-corporate-transformation/.
Pete Hegseth, The War on Warriors (2024).
Katrina Manson, Project Maven: A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare (2026).
Scott Ritter, Disarmament in the Time of Perestroika: Arms Control and the End of the Soviet Union (2022).
David E. Sanger et al., “Trump Lays Out Vision of Power Restrained Only by ‘My Own Morality,” New York Times, Jan. 8, 2026, at https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.html.
Jason Scholz & Jai Galliott, “The Case for Ethical AI in the Military,” in The Oxford Handbook of Ethics of AI (Markus D. Dubber et al., eds. 2021).
Namir Shabibi & Alex Croft, “’We Want to Use It for Everything’: How Project Maven Became Central to America’s AI-Powered Warfare,” The Independent, March 10, 2026, at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/project-maven-ai-us-airstrike-iraq-anthropic-b2929138.html.
Brandi Vincent, “Feinberg’s New Maven Directive Sets AI-enabled Decision-Making as ‘The Cornerstone’ for CJADC2,” Center for Security and Emerging Technology, April 4, 2026, at https://cset.georgetown.edu/article/feinbergs-new-maven-directive-sets-ai-enabled-decision-making-as-the-cornerstone-for-cjadc2/.
Related Video:
“Running with Scissors: AI and the Race for the Future,” at https://ethicsunwrapped.utexas.edu/video/running-with-scissors-ai-and-the-race-for-the-future.