Meet the Gods of AI Warfare

Nearly a year later, on a hot day in the high summer of 2025, I stepped into NGA’s headquarters at the Fort Belvoir Army Base in northern Virginia. It was my second visit to the spy agency HQ, and I wanted to find out why Whitworth had changed his mind, how much Maven had spread, and how Maven’s new backers saw the risks and rewards of mainstreaming AI into military workflows.

By then, Whitworth had become so ardent a fan of AI that his agency was pumping out machine-produced intelligence reports for US decisionmakers that “no human hands” had touched. And the NGA had launched a $708 million contract for data labeling in support of Maven’s computer vision models, the largest such appeal in US history, that would ultimately go not to self-made billionaire Alexandr Wang’s Scale AI but to Enabled Intelligence, a startup focused on hiring people on the autism spectrum expert in pattern recognition and comfortable with repetitive work.

My visit required the rigmarole of any meeting at a spy agency. Courteous background checks and vetting; no phone, laptop, or smartwatch allowed; and one step more curious: writing down not only the make and model, but also the serial number inscribed on my tape recorder, which I resolved never to use again for any interview after the visit.

The building was a temple to geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, the pursuit of insightful analysis tied to locations on a map. A mesh of reflective glass encased by nearly 2,000 concrete triangles covered the blast-resistant facade, as if each one were attempting to triangulate a different location. More than 8,500 personnel worked at headquarters, but I was there to meet four particular NGA officials. Each, in their own way, was deeply involved in the development, standards, and spread of Maven. It was, I was told, unprecedented for them to gather all in one room to brief a journalist on Maven, and I was eager to hear what was at stake for them.

“This is our reputation on the line,” Whitworth told me in the interview. After he saw how easy it was to integrate the system into combat scenarios, it didn’t take long for him to change his mind: “I started really believing in it.” Far from being sheepish about ushering in a new age of AI warfare, its midwives wanted their names stamped over it. Some had become quite “ornery” in pursuit of credit, one NGA official said. I wondered if NGA wanted its fair share, mindful that some advising the second Trump administration wanted to wrest control of Maven and AI away from NGA and back into the Pentagon. “There’s no one person who can claim credit for this thing. It’s too big.”

The NGA officials walked me through Maven’s developments since the agency took over most of it two years before. Five of eight Maven initiatives, including analyzing drone feeds and satellite imagery, ended up with NGA. Whitworth wanted to expand the scope and capabilities of his agency in line with the expansion of ubiquitous global sensors. AI relied on data, and that required global surveillance to deliver it. While NSA could listen in to the world, NGA could watch it. Whitworth made clear he wanted to do that in minute, constant detail—surveilling the entire globe, at all times. NGA previously gave me a demonstration showing how AI could flag military construction in China—such as the arrival of a new rail depot at a missile base. NGA kept track of all movement at 49,000 airfields around the world. Whitworth even wanted to put GPS, or a similar navigation system, on the moon. And if GPS got jammed or hacked, he wanted other ways to map space too: NGA was fashioning digital maps drawing on magnetics, gravity, remote sensing, celestial navigation, and elevation. “From seabed to space,” went the new mantra he unveiled in 2023. The US war horse wanted omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence.