NATO picks Palantir’s Maven AI for military planning, amid trans-Atlantic tension
American Combatant Commands worldwide already make heavy use of Palantir’s Maven Smart System to rapidly share and analyze planning data. Now NATO will start using it too.
Images of RAF Air Controllers aboard an RAF Boeing E-3D Sentry, aka AWACS, conducting a mission in support of NATO. (British Ministry of Defense)
WASHINGTON — Amidst disputes over Trump’s tariffs, Ukraine, and the very future of the US-Europe alliance, NATO’s operational headquarters has committed to using American AI software for military planning, Palantir’s Maven Smart System. Allied Command Operations “will begin using the new system within the next 30 days,” according to a NATO press release this morning.
The acquisition was finalized on March 25, the release said. The value of the contract was not disclosed.
The new tech is meant to provide “customized state-of-the-art AI capabilities to the Alliance, and empowering our forces with the tools required on the modern battlefield to operate effectively and decisively,” NATO Communications and Information Agency General Manager Ludwig Decamps said in the release.
NATO has been bedeviled for decades by its member nations using incompatible technology, ranging from secure radios that can’t communicate with foreign models to fuel nozzles that don’t fit in foreign tanks. Maven Smart System (MSS) was specifically created to combine previously “siloed” databases within the US military. If it can do the same thing across some or all of NATO’s 32 member nations, it could greatly streamline international coordination and the planning of combined operations.
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MSS has already become indispensable to many planners in the US military, from the Joint Staff in the Pentagon to theater-level Combatant Commands around the world, including Stuttgart-based European Command, officials in the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) have previously told Breaking Defense. In 2024, the CDAO ssued contracts worth more than $500 million expand the user base from “hundreds” to “thousands” across the Defense Department.
Created in 2021 as a spin-off of the controversial Maven object-recognition AI — originally built to scan hours of surveillance video for terrorist targets — MSS pulls into data from a host of sources, both classified and public, and organizes it into a single, searchable database. (The imagery-analysis version of Maven still exists, now run by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, and is also in high demand).
That allows staff officers and commanders to quickly look up and cross-reference anything from the supply status of a friendly unit to targeting data on a potential adversary or social-media reports of local unrest, without the traditional labor-intensive process of spending hours or days digging through multiple, often-incompatible databases.
Recent upgrades added generative AI capabilities such as Large Language Models, the NATO release says. By using a so-called open architecture philosophy of fesign, MSS also allows users to customize their interface or even add third-party analytical tools from “third-party” vendors other than Palantir, while still ensuring all the users are looking at the same underlying data.
Combining a common foundation of “ground truth” with customizable tools on top allows Maven users to share all sorts of data rapidly, without having to conform to a single top-down, one-size-fits-all megasystem, officials previously explained. That makes it particularly attractive to NATO, which said today MSS was acquired in rapid speed, at least for NATO: in six months after the formal requirement was identified.
