Tech bros optimized war… and it’s working

The US military is rolling out the Maven Smart System, an AI platform built on Palantir's technology, across all branches of the armed forces. The system uses computer vision and sensor fusion to analyze drone footage, identify and track targets, and shorten the kill chain. A technical breakdown covers how a similar open-source stack could be assembled: Apache Kafka for real-time data ingestion, Apache Spark for stream processing, OpenCV for object detection, Neo4j as a graph database to model battlefield relationships, and Open Policy Agent for policy enforcement. AI agents are then layered on top via the Model Context Protocol. The piece also covers the corporate ecosystem behind Maven, including Palantir, AWS, Azure, Anduril, and OpenAI, and the controversy around Anthropic's removal from government contracts.