Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend - April 3rd, 2026

Summary

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Bloomberg Businessweek Weekend – April 3rd, 2026

Hosts: Carol Massar, Tim Stenovec
Date: April 2, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode examines the ongoing U.S. war in Iran through two tightly interconnected lenses:

• The impact of the conflict on global supply chains, with a focus on the aluminum market following Iranian strikes on key Gulf smelters.
• The "invisible architecture" of modern warfare—specifically, the rapid rise of artificial intelligence, its origins in the Pentagon, and its battlefield deployment, as detailed by Bloomberg's Katrina Manson in her new book.

Both threads offer a look at how war today reverberates far beyond the battlefield, affecting materials, markets, and the very nature of decision-making in conflict.

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The U.S.–Iran War and Global Aluminum Supply Shock

[02:30–15:54]

Summary

The war sparked dramatic market volatility, especially after President Trump’s Oval Office address signaled a potentially imminent end to hostilities. However, Iranian strikes in the Persian Gulf crippled major aluminum production hubs, triggering surging prices and fears of long-term supply disruption.

Key Discussion Points

• Global Aluminum Market Structure

  • China produces the most, but its aluminum is consumed domestically.
  • Russia is the largest global exporter outside China, followed by the Middle East, U.S., and Canada. The Middle East accounts for about 10% of world output.
  • "Aluminum touches every market... every building market, every aerospace market, every automobile market." – Joe Doe, [09:11]

• The Iranian Strikes

  • Hits on Emirates Global Aluminum (EGA) and smelters in the UAE and Bahrain disrupted 3.2 million tons/year of production.
  • EGA is a critical supplier of high-purity aluminum for U.S. defense and aerospace (“That really caught my attention...defense industry’s been looking at EGA closely.” – Joe Doe, [06:11])

• Ripple Effects and Historical Precedents

  • The last comparable shock was after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022: Russian aluminum (~4 million tons/year) became untouchable due to sanctions, causing prices to jump 30%.
  • Impacts now could rival or exceed that, depending on how protracted the Middle East outages become.

• Strategic Implications and ‘Commodity Wars’

  • Ongoing conflict exposes hidden dependencies—materials like aluminum, fertilizers, gallium—as potential vulnerability points.
  • “Every conversation I have is supply chain...people start to go deep...aluminum touches every market.” – Joe Doe, [09:11]

• Aluminum Industry Response

  • Charles Johnson (Aluminum Association): “The apparent targeted attacks on aluminum assets in the Gulf are troubling. We’re relieved to hear there were no fatalities...firms are working around the clock to mitigate impacts and adjust operations and supply routes as needed.” [10:44]
  • Joe Doe: “Our story says this potentially could be one of the most disruptive moments in the history of the aluminum market.” [11:49]

• Tariffs and Globalization

  • U.S. reliance on Canadian aluminum is hampered by new tariffs (up to 50%), complicating domestic industry survival.
  • Quote: “If you allow for an industry to completely disappear...it takes with it the entire IP and the human intellect...20 years to get it back.” – Mike Bless, ex-Century Aluminum CEO, relayed by Joe Doe, [14:22]

Notable Moments

• Joe Doe reiterating the compounded effect of geopolitics, tariffs, and war:

  “If you take 10% out of any market, that’s problematic...and you combine it with tariffs on Canada...this global market [is] under constant crisis.” [12:24]

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Project Maven, AI Warfare, and the Pentagon's Digital Revolution

[16:49–42:46]

Summary

The episode pivots from physical disruption to digital transformation, with a deep dive into Project Maven, the Pentagon’s quietly revolutionary AI program. Katrina Manson, whose book "Project: A Marine, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare" charts the project’s birth and impact, outlines how Silicon Valley, military reformers, and the realities of modern war led to a new era of algorithmic decision-making.

Key Discussion Points

• AI on the Modern Battlefield

  • CENTCOM Chief Brad Cooper (March 11, 2026):

    “Our warfighters are leveraging advanced AI tools...help us sift through vast amounts of data in seconds so our leaders can cut through the noise and make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react...Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot...but AI can turn hours or even days into seconds.” [17:19]

• Origins: The Vision of Drew Cukor

  • In 1997, Cukor imagined “white dots fused with understanding...can contribute to a highly accurate battle space picture.” [17:45]
  • Project Maven launched in 2017, in pursuit of “Google Earth for war”—hundreds of data feeds, computer vision for target ID, and now LLMs for planning. [18:42]
  • First large-scale deployment: The chaotic 2021 U.S. withdrawal from Kabul.

• Path from Academia to War Room

  • Cukor, a driven (and controversial) Marine, pushed for better tools and direct intelligence to battlefield operators (“constantly refusing to stay in his box”).
  • Cukor’s effort to enlist commercial tech:
    • Sought Google, which withdrew after employee protests against Pentagon contracts.
    • Palantir became the reluctant-but-ultimately-pivotal partner:

      “Palantir doesn’t want it...not an AI company...but Drew Cukor is very compelling, convincing…the partnership develops.” – Katrina Manson, [23:57]

• Inside the ‘Mavenites’ and Ethics

  • Cultural mix: Some team members driven by civic duty (“saving civilian lives”), others by more aggressive attitudes (“I want to reduce the non-American population,” “I want to kill people all the time”).
  • Cukor’s reflection: “When this book comes out, I hope people see...all American views…have gone into creating AI and the AI...will be the product of our decisions.” [29:45]

• Controversy, Detachment, and Human Oversight

  • U.S. public messaging: “Humans will always be in the loop”; official policy is less clear—speaks of “appropriate levels of judgment.” [35:36]
  • Push towards autonomy (“on the loop” vs. “in the loop”):
    • True autonomous weapons defined, but high-level Pentagon officials sometimes misunderstand/lack nuance.
    • Example programs: "Goalkeeper", "Whiplash" (an armed, autonomous jet ski intended for Taiwan scenarios). [37:55]

• AI Error, Escalation Risks, and Ethical Unease

  • LLMs exposed as prone to “escalate and agree with you”—a non-trivial risk in war environments.

    “LLMs...have a tendency to escalate and agree with you...in a war setting, asking an LLM to help you plan a campaign...that’s not my example; that’s from military operators.” – Katrina Manson, [32:49]

  • Real-world consequences: A documented case where AI-targeting contributed to a U.S. drone strike killing a civilian, with chat logs included in Manson’s book. [34:48]

• The ‘AI Oppenheimer’ Paradox

  • Despite public debate, key project leaders like Cukor express no regrets, while others reflect on the dangerous precedent of “better weapons” (invoking comparison with Oppenheimer and the bomb).
  • Manson observes:

    “All deterrence theory is changing...AI may become the new deterrence...[but] is it bluster and positioning, or are these tools actually reliable?” [40:05]

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Project Maven’s real-world impact:

  • “CENTCOM said...they have now hit more than 10,000 targets through this war, including a thousand in the first 24 hours because of the ability for using Maven.” [34:13]
  • “Palantir is loudly calling this...the first large scale combat...driven, enhanced by and made more productive with the help of AI.” [34:16]

• On the risk of runaway techno-optimism:

  • “AI remains a narrow, faulty tool with considerable limits...that the US military is still discovering.” [32:32]
  • “The US begins to try and understand: how can we be quicker than China even though our number of forces are fewer?...the US is, of course, overwhelmingly the best equipped...and continues to be.” [38:05]

• On the safety of the world post-AI:

  • "Everyone is claiming bigger and better weapons will keep us safe...but just as many, perhaps more...argue it was a terrible decision...Einstein...said [the bomb] was, in his view, the biggest mistake of his life." – Katrina Manson, [41:09–42:46]

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Key Timestamps

• Pres. Trump Oval Office Address, Market Context: 02:40–03:09
• Aluminum Supply Disruption Explainer (Joe Doe): 05:24–15:29
• CENTCOM on AI Tools in Battlefield Decision-Making: 17:19
• Katrina Manson on Maven Origins, Modern Field Use: 18:42–20:54
• AI Ethics, Team Culture, Civil-Military Fault Lines: 27:29–29:45
• Human vs. Automated Targeting Policy: 35:36–37:55
• AI Escalation and Limits (“narrow, faulty tool”): 32:32
• Project Maven’s Role in Iran War, LLMs at the Center: 34:13–34:48
• Broader Geopolitical Implications, China, and Deterrence: 38:05–40:49
• Big Picture: Is the World Safer After AI in War? 41:06–42:46

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Episode Tone & Takeaways

The hosts maintain Bloomberg’s signature blend of incisiveness and curiosity, frequently grounding technical or geopolitical abstractions in real-world relevance.

• Repeated questioning about where the world is headed, both in terms of tangible markets (“commodity wars”, supply chain shocks) and intangibles (“algorithmic warfare,” human oversight, ethics).
• Katrina Manson provides clarity, storytelling, and the perspective of years tracking the rise of AI in military use, offering hope for debate but caution about the rush to automate deadly force.

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Further Reading & Listening

• Katrina Manson’s book: Project: A Marine, His Team, and the Dawn of AI Warfare
• Bloomberg reporting on global commodities, Project Maven, and AI’s role in defense

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"This is the era we are living in. Incredible reporting...a must read." – Carol Massar, [43:06]

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Transcript

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[Host/Anchor]

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[Carol Massar]

is Bloomberg Business Week Daily reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead with insight on the people, companies and trends shaping today's complex economy. Plus global business, finance and tech news as it happens. The Bloomberg Business Week Daily Podcast with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Radio Hi everyone.

[Host/Anchor]

Welcome to the Bloomberg Businessweek Week Weekend podcast. The U.S. war in Iran was once again top of mind this past week. President Trump gave an evening address from the Oval Office on Wednesday.

[President Donald Trump]

Thanks to the progress we've made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America's military objectives shortly. Very shortly, we are going to hit them extremely hard over the next two to three weeks. We're going to bring them back to the Stone Ages where they belong.

[Host/Anchor]

President Trump this past week in an evening address from the Oval Office, US Stocks seem to look for any signs of an end to the war to rally, which they actually did this past week.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

That actually happened on Tuesday on headlines

[Host/Anchor]

suggesting the US and Iran might be looking for a way out of the war. That triggered a rush to dump bearish bets with wagers against companies in the S&P 500 having stood near a three year high. The overall uncertainty though and flow of headlines throughout the week about the war just kept impacting stocks and markets. It also impacted aluminum and energy prices

[Narrator/Reporter]

on that, specifically aluminum. Iranian strikes on Persian Gulf aluminum plants threatened that supply chain, a reminder of the basic materials so necessary in many industries and supply chains. Bloomberg's Joe Doe is tracking this and joins us in a moment.

[Host/Anchor]

Plus the invisible architecture of modern warfare. We've got a deep dive into a decade old project out of the Pentagon that's being put to use in the US war with Iran. The project championed by one Marine colonel who enlisted Silicon Valley to bring to life a vision for AI warfare.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Bloomberg's Katrina Manson described it this way. Imagine Google Earth for war, a map of war with white dots infused with information like elevation coordinate what is precisely there, whether it's friendly or foe.

[Host/Anchor]

I gotta say Katrina Manson should know. She is the Bloomberg News reporter covering technology and national security. She has spent years writing about Project Maven. That work, the reporting, her discoveries are all in her book. Her new book, Project A Marine, His Team and the dawn of AI Warfare.

[Narrator/Reporter]

All of that to come. We begin though with the industrial fallout of a war that continues to take shots at the global supply chain. Recent Iranian strikes on major aluminum smelters in the UAE and Bahrain have crippled production at key hubs, sending metal prices this week to multi year highs.

[Host/Anchor]

That's also raising the prospect of record prices for the metal used in everything from airplanes and weapons to food packaging and solar panels. U.S. listed aluminum stocks gained after a rally in the metal price following Iran's attacks on Middle Eastern aluminum facilities. On that and what we needed to understand about the aluminum market and today's key materials supply chains, we leaned on Bloomberg News corporate and economic statecraft reporter Joe Doe who formerly covered precious metals and mining here at Bloomberg. He just knows everything and anything about this space.

[Joe Doe (Bloomberg News corporate and economic statecraft reporter)]

Just a quick overview of the world in aluminum. Everybody knows in the aluminum space that aluminum is either produced in China, which is none of that leaves China, it just stays there. Russia, which is the world's biggest Ex China producer, the Middle east, the United States in some bits, and Canada, which is the big one here in North America. The Middle East a lot of people don't think about even in the metals world, but it is, does account for about 10% of global aluminum production. And I think what really struck me over the weekend, and apologies, I don't really mean to use that the word struck, but what really surprised me over the weekend was the attack on EGA that really caught my attention because if you talk to people both in the aluminum industry, but also people in the national.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

This is Emirates Global Aluminum.

[Joe Doe (Bloomberg News corporate and economic statecraft reporter)]

Emirates Global Aluminum. Okay, that's correct. If you talk to people both in the aluminum industry, but also the defense industry, EGA is one that they have been looking at closely. Right. And ega produces their two aluminum smelters in the Middle east produce something like 2.5 million tons per year. They're also a massive producer of what is called high purity aluminum. High purity aluminum, quite simply is the aluminum needed for defense applications in aerospace and armored vehicles like Bradley vehicles.

[Host/Anchor]

Wow.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Okay, so this matters. Yeah, matters in a big way. So in terms of EGA and what's happened to it, is this going to result then, Joe, in like kind of a longer term impact on pricing and prices?

[Joe Doe (Bloomberg News corporate and economic statecraft reporter)]

Yeah, I think, I think that is really the big concern here. My, my colleagues in London and here in the US were writing overnight that the total combined amount of aluminum produced at the two facilities that were struck accounts for about 3.2 million tons of aluminum produced per year in the world. The idea has been everybody's focused on aluminum oil. Right. But if you, if you have these two massive facilities concerned that they come offline on some level you are starting to wonder like, where do we get tonnage? And it's not just like 300,000 tons. We're talking again in the millions of tons. The market already has been seeing inventories declining. If there is real concern that you are no longer able to get aluminum out of the Middle east as a reliable amount, then you do start to have real concerns. My colleagues again over the past day had reported. Last time we saw a real shock to the aluminum market was in 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine and there were massive concerns that nobody would be able to touch Russian aluminum. Right. Because we saw all the sanctions coming in. Russia at the time was just a producer of about 4 million tons of the global market. The price rose as much as 30% globally. The aluminum price. So we're talking about three to three and a half million just in The Middle east alone, by comparison, I think there are just a lot of concerns and a lot of unknowns.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

You know, Joe, I just think about all the conversations that we've had with you about, you know, rare earths, critical minerals, if you will, and just, you know, once again, we have an event, a war that is pulling back the layer and just exposing, you know, who owns what different minerals, materials. And I just think about what that means for the future in terms of everybody looking to make sure that they have access either in their backyard or they have allies where they can get it. I mean, you work on statecraft. Are we just increasingly seeing that's where our war. Our war, excuse me, our world is moving towards.

[Joe Doe (Bloomberg News corporate and economic statecraft reporter)]

Every conversation I have is supply chain, right? So over the past three or four weeks now, when I sit down with individuals and ask them, okay, I'm looking at the straight of Hormuz, like, what else am I missing, right? And the assumed is, I know I'm not missing the oil aspect of this whole thing, right? And they've been telling me now for weeks, well, have you looked at fertilizer? Have you looked at aluminum? Have you looked at gallium, right? Like, they really start to go deep because this is the way that so many people are thinking around these wars, right? Okay, well, what supply chain is going to be disrupted here? I mean, aluminum touches every market, every market, every building market, every. Every aerospace market, every automobile market. It is. This is the thing that people are looking at on lower levels, right? Like, obviously, we have a potential oil crisis here, but they are looking well beyond that into not only like the Strait of Hormuz, but like, what if you see extended attacks against these types of infrastructure that cause massive supply chain disruptions that people had not been considering yet.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Yeah, I think about. We talk about the tech war, right? Or going after different things, but now you've got really kind of the commodity war, or I'm not even quite sure what to call it, but you really kind of. You understand the power here.

[Joe Doe (Bloomberg News corporate and economic statecraft reporter)]

I think it said a lot that in our story, we noted that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard said they took credit for attacking those two aluminum plants and said the reason they did so is because those two aluminum plants supply aluminum to the United States military. I think that says a lot.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

So, Joe, I'm looking at a press release from the Aluminum association, and Charles Johnson, the Aluminum association president and CEO, says the apparent targeted attacks on aluminum assets in the Gulf are troubling.

[Narrator/Reporter]

We're relieved to hear there were no

[Co-host/Interviewer]

fatalities at these facilities. Aluminum firms are working around the clock

[Narrator/Reporter]

to mitigate impacts and adjust operations and

[Co-host/Interviewer]

supply routes as needed.

[Narrator/Reporter]

It continues to say the industry has a proven track record of more than a century of adapting to regional and

[Co-host/Interviewer]

global challenges while continuing to meet the evolving needs of our customers. The idea of a century of adopting to regional and global challenges, that's a lot of. That's two world wars or one world war, I should say. But also a lot of other challenges in geopolitics. And I'm wondering how this one. Because this world is more integrated when it comes to supply chains than it has been in other parts of our history. Where this sort of stands in the context of other disruptions that this industry has actually seen.

[Joe Doe (Bloomberg News corporate and economic statecraft reporter)]

The story that we have out today says that this potentially could be one of the most disruptive moments in the history of the aluminum market.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Why is that? In a world where America is supposed to be turning inward, this idea of America first, you covered this a lot over the last year and a half where we're trying to be more reliant, where other countries are understanding that trade barriers are coming up and they need to be more reliant because other countries are sort of shutting off in some respects. Why is this one, why is this happening?

[Joe Doe (Bloomberg News corporate and economic statecraft reporter)]

I mean, without going into a full history of what we've seen in the aluminum market for the 12 years that I've covered alone at Bloomberg, you have so many things going on. If you just take, okay, the potential of 10% of global aluminum production is threatened by actual kinetic war. Okay, so you take 10% out of any market, that that's problematic. You combine with the fact that the United States president reapplied tariffs on aluminum at a higher rate, specifically on Canada, who is one of the United States closest allies, both militarily and importantly economically. Canada supplies half of the aluminum we consume in the United States. That's been problematic to the market here in the United States. You have. Century Aluminum has been shutting down capacity over the past few years because of high power prices. Alcoa has been shifting its production outside of the United States for a very long time. Much of its production is now in Canada. They also do a bunch in Australia because of again, high energy prices. China produces the most in the world, but they consume all of it. And then we have a war between Ukraine and Russia that has effectively made off limits the 4 million or so tons that kind of come out of Russia. I mean, this is a. We've compounded so many different events that have happened over just a decade that are now putting this global market under constant crisis.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Having said that, I'm just, you know, I'm listening to you, Joe, and I, I'm thinking, okay, so this pushback on globalization, making sure, you know, you can do kind of everything on your domestic home front or something. But I think what's happening now and even going back to the pandemic, it's making you realize, wait a minute, maybe there's a statecraft where it's another form of globalization where you have to have allies. It's not just about military backing you up, but you've got to make sure you have, you can share resources that are critical.

[Joe Doe (Bloomberg News corporate and economic statecraft reporter)]

Yeah, I think it's difficult for this market to have the high tariffs on Canadian imports. I understand the people who support it, what their argument is, but I do know that it is making it incredibly difficult for consumers here in the United States. And I don't mean like you and me. I mean the people who actually buy the aluminum and turn it into stuff and, you know, yeah, it's just a difficult situation. There's an argument that Mike Bless, the former CEO of Century Aluminum, made back in 2015, to me, he said, you know, if you do allow for an industry to completely disappear in the United States, it takes with it the entire IP and the human intellect that goes behind that industry, and it takes about 20 years to get it back. So in some ways, the Trump administration might argue what Mike Bless had said, which is this is another reason why we do need to continue supporting production here in the United States. It's just difficult after we've seen the fact that Canada is our biggest supplier and slapping the up to 50% tariffs on them, what that has done to our market. And yeah, it's no easy solution here.

[Narrator/Reporter]

Our thanks to Joe Do, Bloomberg News corporate and economic statecraft reporter who spent years covering metals and mining. After our conversation with Joe, we did learn on Wednesday that Emirates Global Aluminum, it's the Middle East's top producer of the metal, and Joe referred to it in our conversation, actually halted operations at its Al Tawila smelter after the site was struck by Iranian missiles and drones over the weekend. This, according to a person familiar with the matter.

[Host/Anchor]

Coming up, from the raw aluminum used to build missiles to the AI code deciding where they land.

[Narrator/Reporter]

We talk Project Maven and how the Pentagon pivoted to AI war machines. You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek. This is Bloomberg.

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[Host/Anchor]

The US war in Iran is now more than one month old. Attacks from all sides continue, as do clashes over peace talks.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

We've talked about the cost of the

[Narrator/Reporter]

war, lost lives, destruction in the Middle east, the impact on global energy markets, and the billions of dollars spent on military equipment. Also, the changing face of how war

[Host/Anchor]

is fought for the United States. That has included the role of artificial intelligence.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

CENTCOM Chief Brad Cooper addressed that in an update on the US war in Iran. This was back on March 11th.

[CENTCOM Chief Brad Cooper]

Our warfighters are leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools. These systems help us sift through vast amounts of data in seconds so our leaders can cut through the noise and make smarter decisions faster than the enemy can react. Humans will always make final decisions on what to shoot and what not to shoot and when to shoot. But advanced AI tools can turn processes that used to take hours and sometimes even days into seconds.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

And then a CENTCOM chief Brad Cooper back on March 11th AI in war. It is here algorithmic warfare AI for intelligence and weapons. We might be able to link it all back to a vision, an idea written in a thesis by Drew Cukor back in 1997. He wrote White dots fused with an understanding of the enemy, invalidated by other collection assets can contribute to a highly accurate battle space picture. It's a lot. But this seemed to be his mission and may have led to what some have described as the most important secret military project of the 21st century. She has been covering this secret for a long time. It's all in a new book project, A Marine colonel, his Team, and the dawn of AI Warfare. The author, of course, is Katrina Manson. She's a Bloomberg News reporter covering tech and national security. She's here in our studio. Congratulations. This has been a long project for you, and we want to get into the book and who Drew is and what he did. But tell us, for those who maybe still don't know what Maven is, what

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

this system is, there are two parts of it. What the US Is using right now in its operations against Iran is called Maven Smart System. It emerges from this project that starts in 2017. But what it is today is if you imagine something like Google Earth, Google Maps for war, I imagine a digital screen and a map. But on it are more than 150 data feeds coming in. AI helping to sort through those feeds, computer vision helping to identify possible targets. And what has happened, particularly in the last year or so, is AI tools, LLMs, large language models, helping to begin to offer courses of action, pairing even ideas for pairing a weapon to a target. And that is what is helping speed up those processes that the Admiral was just talking about.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

And we've used it already. And by we, I mean the Department of Defense, the Pentagon out on the battlefield. Carol mentioned 2017 and the Genesis earlier from the 1990s with Drew Cooper. But I'm also wondering about where in recent years the technology has been used.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

The first time it was really put through its paces is in this very difficult moment in US military history, in the withdrawal of US troops from Kabul in Afghanistan in 2021. And at that point, there was a very difficult situation. People coming into the airport. I'm sure all the viewers remember those scenes. Computer vision was used to try and count the number of crowds. Now anyone could see with the naked eye there was a crisis unfolding. But this computer vision was able to pick up very quickly how many people were there and send it back to headquarters and help the people on the ground really emphasize how bad the situation was. It was really the first time that multiple people could be on a system without it crashing. So a lot of this is not so much about AI, but bringing data and systems together, networking and connecting people on the ground to people back in the Pentagon.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

I want to go back to the origin, origin story that you get into. And like so many different things came to mind. I think about you mentioned like 9, 11. Right. And the data that was missed, but it was there on government computers. But things not talking and the role of Drew and what he wanted to do because bringing data together to maybe make the military smarter, maybe save more lives, maybe be smarter in terms of how it does things. Tell us about Drew and who he was.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

He's this fascinating Marine Corps colonel by the end of his career. But at the beginning in the book, I join him as a very young intelligence officer who is angry really from the start because he doesn't have the right tools. And he's very enterprising. He is on the Internet right at the beginning reading open source newspapers. But he manages to run up this huge bill by connecting his computer and gets in trouble. So he is Constantly. Someone who the bureaucracy is saying, don't overspend. Use the existing tools, stay in your box. And someone who is constantly refusing to do that. And he develops this grand vision to bring more intelligence to operators rather than just leave it within the intelligence function. He wants to get information onto the front lines where troops are risking their necks.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Well, what was it about his specific experience in war that motivated him to keep pushing for this?

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

There are a few. One is in October 2001, he is part of the Marine Expeditionary Force sent to Afghanistan. And so he is an intelligence officer. And of course, you'll remember that very quickly, the Marines are being maimed and killed by Imperial Improvised Explosive Devices. Finding out where those were, the patterns that the Taliban were using, even the weather systems that meant that bomb layers were more likely to lay weapons, was something that really eluded the US for years. And in 2011, he's back in the Pentagon and he tries to get this company that is now very well known, Palantir Technologies, to bring their data analytic platform platform out into the field. Now, the US Already had platforms like this, but the common complaint was they weren't fit for purpose.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

So I find, first of all, I feel like I think about Katrina, where we are in AI, and I think how much actually the government 10 years ago, like, either working with Palantir or understanding how valuable data AI specifically could be in warfare. And I just think about how that maybe got everything rolling and, like, go back to their reach out for Silicon Valley and how Palantir came into it. Like, was Palantir just. I know it came through a certain individual, but just kind of at the right place at the right time.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

It's actually even more happenstance than that. Drew Kukul wants Google. Everyone knows that Google is great from a sort of access to the mapping facility and the CIA, which the government was already Right.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Involved in.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

Yes. And income in q Tel, the CIA's investment arm had invested in the company that becomes Google Earth. So they had a real sense that this was the platform they'd want to use. But when Project Maven started in 2017 and Drew Cukor becomes the chief of this project to bring AI computer vision to drone footage to pull out data that they couldn't currently get. What's been publicly well covered is that Google protestors found out that they were on this project and were not keen to work with the Pentagon. When Google responded to this crisis, they decided not to renew the contract. They decided that they wouldn't work on weapons. And Drew Cukor has A problem. He needs a cutting edge technology company to deliver his vision for war. And he rings up Palantir and he says, hey, have you got a minute? And he flies over and meets with a team and says, this is my vision. And actually Palantir doesn't want it. They are not an AI company. They are one of the AI skeptics at this time. And they also don't want to make a user interface. They don't see themselves as the sort of fancy, frilly, nice looking bit they want to do the data crunching, they concede, because Drew Cukor is a very compelling, convincing person who makes his case. And slowly this partnership develops, really between Aki Jain, a senior official at Palantir, and Drew Cukor working late nights to develop this platform to deliver what is now being used in the future of war today.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Pretty amazing.

I want to talk more about the companies that are involved in Project Maven, but before we do that, I want you to talk a little bit about Drew Cukor personally and just the chasing that you did to get an interview with him. The first interview you did with him where it was the realization that you

had because it was so easy to get, right?

I mean, you spent what, a year trying to talk to this guy and he finally agreed to talk to you. Yeah, take us through that.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

I had already written for Bloomberg a piece about Maven smart system and its usage by the 18th Airborne Corps. And this piece had come out and there had been reaction by people who knew Maven very well. And they'd said, well, you know, you really need to speak to someone else you haven't spoken to yet. Who is Drew Cukor? You can't tell the story of AI warfare without him. And eventually, after a year, he did agree to meet, and he was working at J.P. morgan, and we met after work and he offered me water. He took nothing for himself. And we sat opposite each other. And I very quickly realized that he was interviewing me. And he is a very interesting person. He's compelling. He is by all accounts, extremely hardworking and for some people, extremely difficult to work for. In the book, one person describes him as a psychopath and then adds, in the best way. And so I have, oh, we all know those people. I spent quite a lot of time trying to work out what that means. He didn't really eat at work work. He didn't drink. He just worked. And he expected everybody else to do the same. And as he later tells me, we end up speaking every week. And I began to really look forward to Friday Afternoons, which was our time, because I was learning so much about a field that is so complicated and an issue that is so fraught, that has divided people.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Well, that's what I want to get into, but I want to talk a little bit more about the project and the people who worked on it, the mavenites, you know, who worked on it. There was. There was one thing. We read the interview process, and one individual mentioning something about taking out all non Americans. That's in the book. And it's a tough read in print, you know, And I don't think it, or you tell me that it wasn't necessarily what they meant, but it just kind of was an indication of kind of what they thought about this mission and what they were going after or how did you read it?

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

Yeah, I read it. And there's a spectrum. So Drew Cukor speaks very eloquently about saving civilian lives and that this is the point of AI Right? He recruited a very aggressive, aggressive team of Marines himself, a very aggressive Marine. And some of the people on the team, they weren't only Marines, were very cavalier in their delivery. This is particularly a team that has spent time in war, that has lost people, that feels compelled to deliver better tech and comes with a fury for the Pentagon bureaucracy that they feel inhibits the ability to develop tools that will save them, their friends. And for some of them, they were thinking of civilians. But in this case, I did come across examples of people who did say, I want to join this team because I want to reduce the non American population. And on another occasion, someone said, and I'm afraid there are expletives throughout the book because it's full of Marines, but saying, I want to reduce the expletive, I want to kill people, all the expletive time. And. And I think these are being related to me. It certainly wasn't for public consumption, but people told me those things, and they told me because I think they want to explain the breadth of feeling. And I did later say to Drew Cukor, you speak about this very nicely. And some people on your team speak about this in a very different, harsh, aggressive way. How do you see it? And he said to me, well, when this book comes out, I hope that people see that we are all of America, all American views have gone into creating AI and the AI comes out, will be the product of our decisions.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Do you think that's why Drew ended up ultimately being so cooperative with you from being so reticent in the beginning? Was that the message that, like, what motivated him to share so much with you.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

That's always really hard to work out as a journalist. And I never want to ask too much about that once things are happening. But I do think I did ask him one night. You know, I found out a lot about this story that is not flattering. And I spent a long time saying, I'm not a think tank. I am not the defense tech world.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Right.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

I am going to do this as a reporter. And I found out things that you will not find palatable to be told. Tell me why you're leaning into this story. And the reason he gave me was that he said, one, he believes in journalism and the pursuit of the truth. Two, he's proud of what he did and he would do it all again exactly the same way he was investigated. Some of his team behaved, I think, by all accounts in the book, badly. And he said he wanted to make sure that the next generation of young officers was aggressive to reform bureaucracy and deliver battlefield advantage. So that was his reason, I think also there were so many. The more I did the reporting, the more I learned. There were a lot of clashes within the team. The fault line that I had imagined was between civil society and the military. We'd seen that play out in public. But I began to learn that within the team, there were furious debates about whether they should use Palantir or not, whether they were really developing robust and reliable AI, the ethics of it all. So it kept unfolding and he stayed with me through the course, but no

[Co-host/Interviewer]

regrets, because I was thinking about it as I read it or, you know, and in terms of, like, Oppenheimer and the bot, like regrets of creating things. And I just. But no regrets.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

I don't think he would fall in line with the Oppenheimer idea.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Okay.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

But he is very much a. I end up calling him this sort of figure of historical figure of future war. And other people spoke to me saying there is this tussle between us all to be known as the AI. Oppenheimer and others have claimed it in the newspapers as well. We started to get generative AI momentum, making these huge claims for how AI would work. Part of the team wanted me to understand AI fails. There is this big debate, and it's one of the reasons I think I've been able to surface examples where algorithms do go wrong, where AI is not reliable. People are thinking carefully about this and are even the ones pushing for it want a public debate about it.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

There's a quote in the book, and I'm going to be honest. I listen to a podcast I and somebody pulled it out and I'm like, this is really amazing. But it's AI remains a narrow, faulty tool with considerable limits to its usefulness and reliability. Reliability that the US military is still discovering like it's still a work in progress.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

And research shows that LLMs in particular have a tendency to escalate and agree with you. Now, maybe in a corporate setting you can deal with that. In a war setting, asking an LLM to help you plan a campaign with the risk of it always agreeing with you. Shall I strike this target? And it comes up with a reason to justify striking the target. That's not my example. That's an example that military operators have brought to me.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

So should we bring it into today and the conflict that we're seeing right now? It's not exactly clear what technology is being used and where it exactly is being used. And the military wants to hold back on that a little bit. But what have you been able to find and report about Maven being used in the conflict with Iran?

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

I've reported that Maven is being used. The CENTCOM itself doesn't name the tools, but they've said quite publicly that they're using a variety of advanced AI tools. I've also reported that in Maven Smart System there is Claude, this LLM that is at the heart of this big fight between the Pentagon and Anthropic. And it's a very interesting fault line, significant fault line to be playing out as the US is using it at the same time that it is helping speed up processes to enable targeting. And CENTCOM said yesterday they have now hit more than 10,000 targets through this war, including a thousand in the first

[Co-host/Interviewer]

24 hours because of the ability for using Maven. Right.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

To identify targets, I think, or to. I want to be cautious. I don't want to say it's all because of AI and Maven. Obviously the US has been able to bring enormous firepower air battles before, but it is clear that even CENTCOM is saying this is speeding up processes. Palantir is loudly calling this, saying, when we look back at this conflict, we will see this as the first large scale combat. And the words used were driven, enhanced by and made more productive with the help of AI.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

There's a moment in your book with literally the chats that went before a drone strike that killed a civilian. And so what was it like reading that and talking to the drone operator,

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

which example of this, this was a

[Co-host/Interviewer]

drone strike that actually killed a civilian?

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

Yes.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

I mean, things go wrong, I guess, is the Point. And I guess things go wrong pre AI like we know that. And I just, I think we're all trying to figure out, though, does AI get over, you know, out of hand when it comes to. To military battles. And the thing that, you know, that technology companies are worried about it taking over and is that how those in the military, those at the Pentagon, see it, or is there always a human going to be there to kind of work alongside of it?

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

Not necessarily. A lot of senior military commanders say that U.S. policy is we will always have a human in the loop. That's not true. U.S. policy at the Defense Department is there will be appropriate levels of judgment over the use of force. That implies something different, perhaps supervision. Some people refer to that as on the loop. So the process is happening, selecting targets, executing against targets, and there's a human who can stop it, watch what is happening, but it may be in the future happening too fast. Now, the military commanders who incorrectly use that term, human in the loop are of course, trying to assuage the public opinion, often don't know themselves that language because it's a policy document. And I think their use of human in the loop is significant because they're the ones actually conducting operations. So that is how they are seeing it and deciding to execute it. But there's a big push to develop autonomous weapons, exactly the kind of weapons that campaigners were worried about from the outset.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

What is an autonomous weapon?

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

Lots and lots of definitions. In fact, there's a UN body that has spent the last 10 years trying to come up with a definition and disagreeing. But let's say it is a weapons platform that can select, identify, select, and fire at or target an object of its own accord. So this might be, for example, if you imagine a drone that can fly around on its own, its own, without calling back to the Internet, it can plot its path to a certain place. It can, using automatic target recognition, assisted by something like computer vision, select a target and then fire at it or fly right into it and explode. The US Is trying to develop these. And in the book, I explain a couple of the programs that have really developed and are still in production. One is Goalkeeper, the other is Whiplash. Whiplash is an extraordinary thing that I learned about during the course of this book. It is a. It is a jet ski, an autonomous jet ski loaded with weapons. And the idea is that this could be one part of the US arsenal that if it came to a decision to defend Taiwan, if China ever decided, it's a lot.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Well, which takes us back to like, one of the things going through this, and we're so focused on the Middle east, is that this project, right, was started initially with concerns about China.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

You have to see from 2018 onwards, the overriding effort of the senior folks at the Pentagon is beginning to square up to the chance of conflict with China. Having fought in Afghanistan and Iraq for years. There are these assessments that say China has spent 10 years studying American weak points. That would be things like the crown jewels of the US Forces, aircraft carriers, which are, by some analysis, framed as sitting ducks. And so the US begins to try and understand how can we be quicker than China even though our number of forces are fewer? Let's put this in context. The US is, of course, overwhelmingly the best equipped and most moneyed of all the fighting forces, and continues to be.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

But what is China's version of, oh,

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

my goodness, when I get an invite to China to answer that question and give me another 10 years to do it, I will come right back and tell you. But there are interesting research reports that lay out the Chinese ambition. Interestingly, China starts really talking about its vision for AI after US documents start doing it. So there is an argument to be made that the US started this race. But the US was also animated by fears that China can, once it decides to deploy, develop and deploy weapons on a much faster, almost twice as fast as the US So although the US was ahead in some ways, it has also always been animated by this fear that it is playing catch up.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

Katrina, do you think Maven or this type or wherever this goes next in the use of AI throughout warfare might be the ultimate deterrence when it comes to a world war or the next world war? Could it be the thing? I mean, we've been there before. We thought missiles, right? Like, we think about these things that ultimately keeps everybody in place. Or do you not see it that way? We keep having guests come on and say, you know what? This is our new world order. We're going to continue to see battles coming out and about. You just think over the last four years, right, what we've seen. I'm just curious what you think all

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

of deterrence theory is changing because you have obviously nuclear weapons, which is supposed to be the thing that stops great powers going to war. And for years now, the US has observed fighting below that surface, proxy wars. But also this erosion of US military dominance and whether AI can be the new deterrence is something the people who are trying to create AI are fighting for. Obviously they frame it not as it is. We will win or hopefully we won't have to fight because China will be so afraid of us. And so I've spent a long time trying to work out how much might be bluster and positioning to try and deter a war and how much these tools are actually reliable.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

You know, it gets me thinking about somebody who has done the reporting you've done and synthesized it into a book such as this. Do you feel based on what you know and what you've reported and what you found, do you feel like the world is safer as a result of this technology?

Please say yes. Please say yes. No, I'm just kidding. Not kidding.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

I think back to a book I read when I was much younger that was written by a Polish banker named Ivan Bloch in 1899, and the English translation of it was Is War Now Impossible? And the argument he explored was that because the world was producing at wild scales rifles, because weapons had got better and better and better, the claim was made that no one would dare go to war. And he already argued the irony of this, that better weapons would not make for quick wars. They would make for long wars, for stalemate, for terrible human horrors. And of course, 15 years later, there is World War I. His paper is one of the reasons that I wanted to write this, this book, because we are at a moment where everyone is claiming bigger and better weapons will keep us safe. Of course, America is the only country ever to have used the nuclear bomb. And the argument is still made that America had to use it. And the world is really divided because there are just as many, perhaps more people who argue it was a terrible decision and people have regretted it. I know Einstein. Notably, there's a very interesting paper where Alex Carr put in an opinion piece of Palantir. Of Palantir, yes, the chief executive, he referenced Einstein. But in my book, I go on to say he omitted to say that Einstein said that pushing for the bomb was, in his view, the biggest mistake of his life.

[Co-host/Interviewer]

We're going to leave it there. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. The book, as we said, Project A Marine Colonel, His Team and the dawn of AI Warfare. This is the era we are living in. Incredible reporting. Katrina Manson. You know we adore Bloomberg news reporter covering tech and national security. It is a must read. It is out and check it out.

[Katrina Manson (Bloomberg News reporter and author)]

This is Bloomberg.

[Carol Massar]

This is the Bloomberg businessweek daily podcast available on Apple, Spotify and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from 2 to 5pm Eastern on bloomberg.com, the iHeartRadio app TuneIn and the Bloomberg business app. You can also watch us live Every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Terminal.