National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) Director Vice Adm. Frank Whitworth last week pronounced 2025 as the “year of AI” at NGA, highlighting a new expansion of the agency’s AI-enabled detection for analysts as part of NGA’s artificial intelligence push.
“This year, 2025… is the Year of NGA – AI,” Whitworth said on May 21 at the GEOINT Symposium in St. Louis. “So, we’re willing to put our money where our mouth is. At NGA, we’re leveraging AI to help sift through the millions of detectors we get a day and are also starting to train the best industry models on the corpus of NGA reporting.”
One of those investments is the expansion of Project Maven, the Defense Department’s (DoD) flagship AI-driven object detection and analysis platform.
Whitworth said the agency recently awarded Palantir Technologies a $28 million contract to broaden access to the Maven Smart System – part of DoD’s Project Maven – for NGA analysts. The system uses artificial intelligence to analyze imagery and sensor data for faster detection, identification, and tracking of objects of interest.
The expansion coincides with a $795 million increase in the overall contract ceiling for Palantir Technologies’ Maven Smart System, raising the total potential value to $1.3 billion through 2029. The additional funding is intended to support a projected surge in demand from military users for AI-powered software capabilities over the next four years.
“Maven Smart System is designed to speed up detection, identification and characterization of features and objects in drone and satellite imagery,” Whitworth said. He emphasized that the AI system is significantly reducing the time it takes military units to identify and act on targets.
“Army leaders, specifically, are trying to leverage Maven to meet a new vision for units to make a thousand high-quality decisions – choosing and dismissing targets on the battlefield – in one hour,” he said, highlighting a recent exercise where one unit reported a drop in intelligence-to-engagement timelines from hours to minutes.
Maven now supports over 20,000 active users across more than 35 software tools used by military services and combatant commands. That number has quadrupled since March 2024 and more than doubled since January of this year.
The expansion of Maven is one part of NGA’s broader push to modernize geospatial intelligence (GEOINT) through trustworthy, high-performance AI systems. As part of that effort, the agency continues to build on its “Accreditation of GEOINT AI Models” (AGAIM) – NGA’s first attempt to develop community-wide criteria for evaluating the accuracy, reliability, and security compliance of AI models used in defense and intelligence operations.
Since launching AGAIM, Whitworth said, NGA has applied its legal and ethical AI principles and created formal evaluation criteria, including a standardized NGA model card. The agency has now accredited two GEOINT AI models – even one within its own Maven program and another from a partner in the intelligence community.
With that milestone reached, NGA is inviting broader participation in the AGAIM process to ensure models used across the GEOINT enterprise “operate with integrity, precision, and compliance,” he said.
“While we’ve treated AI with the care and power it deserves – we’ve entered into an ‘unchained phase’ by implementing a whole-of-agency approach to AI transformation,” Whitworth said. “And we see that action paying off across the board … Because while 2025 is the Year of AI, 2026 is going to take it to another level. Let’s all be a part of it.”