Mar 23, 2026 6:00 AM

Omniscience, Omnipresence, and Omnipotence: Meet the Gods of AI Warfare

In its early days, the AI initiative known as Project Maven had its fair share of skeptics at the Pentagon. Today, many of them are true believers.

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The rise of AI warfare speaks to the biggest moral and practical question there is: Who—or what—gets to decide to take a human life? And who bears that cost? In 2018, more than 3,000 Google workers protested the company’s involvement in “the business of war” after finding out the company was part of Project Maven, then a nascent Pentagon effort to use computer vision to rifle through copious video footage taken in America’s overseas drone wars. They feared Project Maven’s AI could one day be used for lethal targeting.

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Katrina Manson is an award-winning Bloomberg reporter who covers emerging tech and national security. Her investigations exposed details of the US military’s AI use and US-China rivalry. She was previously the US foreign policy and defense correspondent at the Financial Times. Before that, she was a reporter for FT and ... Read More

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