America's first AI-fueled war is unfolding. How'd we get here?

This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. America's first AI-fueled war is unfolding right now. Over the last three weeks, the U.S. and Israel have launched strikes against Iran, hitting a thousand targets in the first 24 hours alone, nearly double the scale of the 2003 shock-in-awe campaign in Iraq.

The system helping to enable much of this is called the Maven Smart System. And running inside of it is Claude from the company Anthropic, an AI model that millions of people interact with every single day. On the very first day of the war, a U.S. Tomahawk missile struck a girls' elementary school in southern Iran, killing more than 165 people, most of them schoolgirls. A preliminary military investigation found the strike likely resulted from outdated intelligence.

And while the role of AI has not been confirmed, the Pentagon is still investigating whether Maven played any part. At the center of this story is a little known Marine colonel named Drew Kukor, who spent decades fighting to bring AI to the battlefield and whose obsession has quietly changed the future of war. My guest today has been reporting on Kukor for years and how we got here. Katrina Manson is an award-winning Bloomberg reporter who covers cyber, emerging tech, and national security. Her new book is Project Maven, A Marine Colonel, His Team, and the Dawn of AI warfare.

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