The military’s Maven Smart System, which is built by data mining company Palantir, is generating insights from an astonishing amount of classified data from satellites, surveillance and other intelligence, helping provide real-time targeting and target prioritization to military operations in Iran, according to three people familiar with the system.

Embedded into the system is Anthropic’s AI tool Claude, a technology that was banned by the Pentagon last week after heated negotiations over the terms of its use in war.

Over the last year military planners have seen Claude, paired with Maven, mature into a tool that is in daily use across most parts of the military, according to two of the people.

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As planning for a potential strike in Iran was underway, Maven, powered by Claude, suggested hundreds of targets, issued precise location coordinates, and prioritized those targets according to importance, said two of the people. The pairing of Maven and Claude has created a tool that is speeding the pace of the campaign, reducing Iran’s ability to counterstrike and turning weeks-long battle planning into real-time operations, said one of the people. The AI tools also evaluate a strike after it is initiated, the person said.

Claude has also been used in countering terror plots and in the raid that captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. But this is the first time it has been used in major war operations, according to two of the people.

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Military commanders have become so dependent on the AI system that if Amodei directed the military to cease, the Trump administration would use government powers to retain the technology until it can be replaced, said one of the people.

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The Pentagon began to integrate Anthropic’s Claude chatbot into Maven in late 2024, according to public announcements. The system has been used to generate proposed targets, to track logistics and provide summaries of intelligence coming in from the field. The Trump administration has vastly expanded the use of Maven into many other parts of the military, with over 20,000 military personnel using it as of last May.

The commanders now overseeing the Iran campaign are steeped in the use of Maven, having used earlier versions of the system in the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 and to support Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks, according to a talk by Navy Rear Adm. Liam Hulin in 2024. Hulin, now the deputy director of operations at Central Command, said then that the system pulled in information from 179 sources of data.

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It’s been quickly adopted. NATO, which signed a contract with Palantir last year, portrayed its version of Maven as giving commanders video-game like abilities to oversee battles in a recent video. In the American military, the system allowed one artillery unit to do the work of 2,000 staff with a team of just 20 people, according to a study of the system’s use by the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps by Georgetown University.