Meet the Gods of AI War

Almost a year Later, on a hot day in the height of summer in 2025, I walked into NGA headquarters at Fort Belvoir military base in northern Virginia. It was my second visit to the spy agency’s headquarters, and I wanted to know why Whitworth had changed his mind, how widespread Maven had become, and how Maven’s new backers saw the risks and rewards of mainstreaming AI into military workflows.

By then, Whitworth had become such a fan of artificial intelligence that his agency was pumping out machine-generated intelligence reports to U.S. decision-makers untouched by “human hands.” And the NGA has launched a $708 million contract for data classification to support Maven’s computer vision models, the largest such attraction in U.S. history, which will ultimately go not to self-made billionaire Alexander Wang’s Scale AI but to Enabled Intelligence, a startup focused on hiring people on the autism spectrum who are expert in pattern recognition and comfortable in repetitive work.

My visit required the complexity of any meeting at a spy agency. Background checks and courteous vetting; No use of phone, laptop or smart watch is permitted; And another, more curious step: writing down not only the make and model, but also the serial number on my tape recorder, which I decided to never use again in any interview after the visit.

The building was a temple to geospatial intelligence, or GEOINT, the pursuit of insightful analysis linked to locations on a map. A grid of reflective glass covered with nearly 2,000 concrete triangles covered the blast-proof facade, as if each one was trying to locate a different location. The headquarters had more than 8,500 employees, but I was there to meet four specific NGA officials. Each of them, in their own way, has been deeply involved in the development, standards, and deployment of Maven. I was told that it was unprecedented for them to all come together 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 seeing how easily the system could be integrated into combat scenarios, it didn’t take long for him to change his mind: “I started to really believe in it.” Far from feeling shy about ushering in a new era of AI warfare, the midwives wanted to stamp their name on it. Some have become quite “unruly” in seeking credit, an NGA official said. I wondered if the NGA wanted its fair share, considering that some advisers to the second Trump administration wanted to wrest control of Maven and AI away from the NGA and return it to the Pentagon. “There’s not one person who can claim credit for this thing. It’s too big.”

NGA officials kept me updated on Maven’s developments since the agency took over most of it two years ago. Five of Maven’s eight initiatives, including analysis of drone feeds and satellite imagery, have ended up with the NGA. Whitworth wanted to expand his agency’s scope and capabilities in line with the expansion of its ubiquitous global sensors. AI has relied on data, and this requires global monitoring to deliver it. While the NSA can listen to the world, the NSA can watch it. Whitworth explained that he wanted to do this in continuous, precise detail – observing the entire globe, at all times. The NGA previously gave me a demonstration of how AI could signal military construction in China, such as the arrival of a new railway depot to a missile base. NGA tracked all movements at 49,000 airports around the world. Whitworth even wanted to put GPS, or a similar navigation system, on the moon. And if GPS was jammed or hacked, he wanted other ways to map space, too: The NGA was designing digital maps based on magnetism, gravity, remote sensing, celestial navigation, and elevation. “From the bottom of the sea to space,” went the new slogan unveiled in 2023. The American warhorse wanted absolute knowledge, absolute existence, and absolute power.