Trump over dinner with Amodei and AI in the hands of the military. What is Maven?

On Sunday evening, Donald Trump dined with Dario Amodei, founder of Anthropic, at the White House. It was a delicate meeting, preceded by the circulation of an internal memo containing insults directed at the San Francisco-based company. Today, however, the US president is set to summon all the major tech companies, including Anthropic. Trump acknowledges that there are critical issues surrounding the rapid development of AI but does not wish to squander the lead his country has built up over China. However, the dinner with Amodei forms part of a more complex backdrop of tensions – including legal disputes – that have pitted the company against the government for months. As recently as 25 September, a federal court of appeal in Washington upheld the Pentagon’s decision, dating back to March, to designate Anthropic as a risk factor in the supply chain, effectively excluding it from the technological chain of command used by the Department of Defence (DoD). The case had been brought by Anthropic following weeks of fruitless discussions with the government between March and April 2026. The decision also conflicts with a previous ruling handed down in San Francisco, California, in August. The latter ruling, whilst based on slightly different grounds, deemed the exclusion of Amodei’s company to be excessive, and it is plausible to assume that the matter will reach the Supreme Court to put an end to the dispute. Unless diplomatic contacts between Trump and Amodei manage to quell the legal battle. The ruling also serves to confirm the use of artificial intelligence in intelligence and military systems.

This refers to the Maven Smart System, used in the capture of Maduro and in the attacks in Iran. And amongst the fifty-one pages of the court order, including the dissenting opinion of Judge Karen Henderson, the precision operation to arrest the Venezuelan president is mentioned as the main point of contention between Anthropic and the DoD. According to executives at the company that owns the Claude LLM, the Pentagon allegedly breached Anthropic’s own guidelines against using its models for the ‘mass surveillance of American citizens, even for lawful purposes’ and for the implementation of autonomous weapon systems. For their part, administration officials have accused Anthropic of triggering the LLM’s internal safety safeguards, thereby jeopardising the success of the operation and the safety of the personnel involved. Furthermore, it appears that Anthropic had also refused similar requests from health authorities, in this instance the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The Maven interface represents one of the highest-calibre elements of technological warfare and intelligence and is a flagship project for the Pentagon, which has allocated $2.3 billion for Maven alone in 2027, having, as of now, replaced Anthropic with OpenAI. The brainchild of the tenacious and visionary commitment of Marine Colonel Drew Cukor, who began working on it in 2017 alongside the major tech giants, Maven faced a revolt by Google employees who were initially involved. Following Google’s withdrawal in 2018, Palantir stepped in and established itself as the main provider of the digital infrastructure. Katrina Manson, in her book ‘Project Maven’, describes the project as the dawn of war with artificial intelligence, whilst Palantir’s CTO Shyam Sankar, in ‘Mobilize’, details Cukor’s operational and bureaucratic odyssey as he sought to drastically cut red tape. Since March 2025, the interface has also been adopted by NATO, providing yet another reason to gain a deeper understanding of it. It functions as an infrastructure for integrating data from any available source – drones, cameras, databases and intelligence reports – for the purposes of conflict zone management and target identification, strategic planning and attack planning using artificial intelligence and machine learning, and the refinement of decision-making and intelligence processes. From a human perspective, Maven’s primary aims are to accelerate and optimise the analysis of massive volumes of data, overcoming the challenges of harmonising disparate sources and information resources. It incorporates large language models (LLMs), primarily—though not exclusively—Anthropic’s Claude. Unlike conventional computer systems, LLMs enable far more refined and comprehensive analytical insights. In ‘The Technological Republic’, Alex Karp denounced the collective amnesia of Google’s engineers, who, by refusing to work on Maven, have contradicted the history of Silicon Valley. Karp made similar remarks in a TV interview regarding Anthropic. He stated that this is a form of instrumental pacifism that risks jeopardising the security of the West.