Deputy Secretary of Defense Steve Feinberg, who is not a career Pentagon official but the billionaire co-founder of Cerberus Capital Management, signed a letter on March 9 directing that Palantir’s Maven AI system become an official program of record across the US military.
Corruption is clearly the problem.
The order moves oversight from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency to the Pentagon’s Chief Digital Artificial Intelligence Office, the same office whose director Cameron Stanley demonstrated Maven’s targeting capabilities at a Palantir corporate event earlier this month.
Program of record means Maven gets its own budget line, its own acquisition pathway, and the kind of institutional permanence that survives administrations. Canceling a program of record requires political will that almost never materializes. This is how you make a vendor relationship into infrastructure.
The timing is obvious. Three weeks into a war with Iran. Thousands of strikes executed through Maven. And now the formalization. The war that Palantir wanted, created the dependency, and the dependency justifies the formalization.
But the pipeline started much earlier than the war.
The Assessment
Palantir’s MOSAIC system has been embedded inside the International Atomic Energy Agency since 2015, part of a $50 million contract to modernize the agency’s verification technology. MOSAIC processed approximately 400 million data objects — satellite imagery, facility documents, sensor measurements, social media feeds from inside Iran. It became what the IAEA called the analytical core of its safeguards inspection regime.
MOSAIC is built on Palantir’s predictive policing architecture. It doesn’t just store and organize data. It infers patterns, projects behavior, maps relationships between people, places, and materials. Experts warned early that feeding false assumptions into such a system would generate false returns. Palantir has a documented history of convincing analysts that shadows are real, leading to extrajudicial assassination of innocent people while never being held accountable.
The IAEA’s reports on Iran, shaped in part by MOSAIC’s analysis, were treated by member states as independent, evidence-based assessments.
They were not independent.
They ran on software built by a company whose three most senior figures (Peter Thiel, Alex Karp, and Joe Lonsdale) had all publicly argued that war with Iran was inevitable or desirable.
Lonsdale said he hoped to invest in Iran after regime change. Karp predicted war with Iran would prove the value of Palantir’s autonomous weapons systems. Thiel framed Iranian nuclear capability as a catastrophe requiring preventive action.
The company that built the assessment tool was ideologically committed to the conclusion their tool would generate.
Tehran released documents alleging that IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi shared Palantir-derived intelligence with Israel. Iranian nuclear scientists whose identities were mapped through MOSAIC-processed data were assassinated. Iran’s foreign minister accused the IAEA of using Palantir as a black box, laundering speculative AI projections into reasons for war. Iran suspended IAEA cooperation. And Grossi himself admitted there was no concrete evidence of a weapons program.
None of this stopped the strikes.
The Execution
Maven provided the targeting. It processed satellite feeds, drone footage, signals intelligence, and radar data to identify and prioritize over 1,000 strike options for military planners in the opening weeks of Operation Epic Fury. Palantir’s stock rose 15% in the first week of the war, its strongest weekly gain since August, while the Nasdaq fell 1.2%. Analysts projected another 40% upside if the conflict continues.
Karp appeared on CNBC at Palantir’s AIPCon 9 event in Maryland and tried to take credit without being able to confirm anything classified. He kept saying he had “read” that Maven was “the core backbone” of US operations in the Middle East, that allies “may or may not be users of our platform,” that “without answering your question, were this to work, there’s only one way you can do it.” A CEO performing modesty about how many people his product helped kill, at a corporate marketing event, while his stock price climbed on the body count.
He also claimed Palantir is “the most important protector of the Fourth Amendment.”
Orwell rolled in his grave.
This from a company that built mass surveillance tools for the NSA, the FBI, ICE, and the LAPD let alone the UK and Germany.
The Pipeline
This is the company that built every stage of the Iran war, from assessment to justification to execution to profit.
Each stage created demand for the next.
The monitoring created the threat narrative. The threat narrative created the authorization. The authorization created the targeting contracts. The targeting created the war. The war created the stock rally. The stock rally created the political capital to lock Maven in as a program of record. The program of record ensures the pipeline is permanent.
This is why the US is losing.
The system isn’t optimized for strategic outcomes. It’s optimized for throughput. Maven processed over 1,000 strike options in the first weeks. But the Strait of Hormuz is still blocked. Iran is closer to Russia and China than before. The region is less stable. The conflict has no articulated end state. The AI produced a thousand targets and zero strategy.
Palantir doesn’t need the war to end. Palantir needs the war to continue. Or better yet, for them, to produce the conditions for the next one. The oracle’s incentive is to keep being consulted, not to resolve the question. The unresolved threat is more valuable to every node in the pipeline than resolution would be.
The Lock
Feinberg’s letter orders the transition completed by September. Future contracting goes through the Army, which already has the $10 billion deal with Palantir in place. Oversight goes to the office that already functions as Palantir’s in-house champion.
The company that assessed the threat, justified the war, targeted the strikes, and profits from the continuation now has permanent program-of-record status, directed by a billionaire from the same investor class as the company’s founders.
The corruption is so obvious, history will not be kind to Palantir.