Katrina Manson — Project Maven
Financial Times journalist reveals the Pentagon's decade-long campaign to integrate artificial intelligence into military operations and decision-making.
Why we picked this
Project Maven is the most consequential AI program most people have never heard of. Manson spent years reporting this story from inside the Pentagon's push to militarize AI.
Project Maven was the Pentagon’s effort to use machine learning for analyzing drone surveillance footage, a seemingly narrow technical program that became the flashpoint for one of the most significant debates in Silicon Valley about the ethics of AI and defense contracts. Katrina Manson’s reporting goes deeper than that controversy, tracing a decade of military AI development and what it means for how wars are fought and decisions made.
Manson is the US national security correspondent for the Financial Times, based in Washington, and has reported extensively on the intersection of technology and military power. The book draws on years of access to officials, engineers, and critics inside and outside government.
The talk will cover the current state of AI in military systems, the ethical questions it raises, and the geopolitical competition (primarily with China) that is driving American military AI investment. This is a subject where precision matters, and Manson brings it.