Katrina Manson's *Project Maven* (W. W. Norton, 2026) is the first inside account of the Pentagon program that put AI into the kill chain — and it's more precise, and more unsettling, than the headlines suggested. This is the factual record, the 2018 Google revolt, and the harder question the book leaves open.

AI-generated (NotebookLM) audio overview. Source: HexLocal in-house research — "Project Maven — What the US Military Actually Built With AI (Katrina Manson)" (Dr. Priya Nair). Primary external sources include Manson's Bloomberg/IPR interviews, W. W. Norton publisher materials, and Tier-1 reviews in The New York Times and The New Yorker.

- Project Maven launched in 2017 to apply computer vision to drone footage — helping analysts triage targets, not replacing human decision-making

- Google was the marquee tech partner; a 2018 employee revolt forced the company out and set a precedent the industry is still living with

- Manson's insider reporting corrects a persistent myth: AI is building target packages, not pulling triggers — but the architecture sits close to the line it hasn't crossed

- The program is now run by Palantir as the Maven Smart System, operating at a scale the original team never envisioned

- The book's central tension is the gap between "human in the loop" as policy and "human in the loop" as meaningful check

- Paul Scharre, Lionel Barber, and Elliot Ackerman all blurbed it; *The Economist* named it one of its Best Books of 2026