# Cameron Stanley — troops' "insatiable appetite" for AI targeting > [!quote] "Operation Epic Fury leveraged Palantir's Maven Smart System in order to conduct strike missions across the entire battle space, 13,000 targets in 38 days." Troops, he added, "have shown an insatiable appetite" for the tech. > — Cameron Stanley, Pentagon Chief Digital & AI Officer, Special Competitive Studies Project AI+Expo, ~May 7, 2026 > [!quote] "The Department right now is looking at a variety of different ways that we can increase our capacity in every domain, in every classification level, to make sure that that insatiable appetite is satisfied, from the lowest possible operator to the most senior commander." > — Cameron Stanley, same remarks ## Context [[Cameron Stanley]] is the Pentagon's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer — the government's top buyer and scaler of military AI, and the former chief of [[Project Maven]] itself. Speaking at the Special Competitive Studies Project's AI+Expo in early May 2026, he gave the fullest official account of how [[Maven Smart System]] was used in the [[Iran War 2026]]: 13,000 targets in 38 days, with classified usage up 89% and peak consumption near 20 billion tokens a day. [Breaking Defense](https://breakingdefense.com/2026/05/insatiable-appetite-for-ai-maven-usage-surged-for-strikes-on-iran-pentagon-ai-chief-says/) reported the remarks on May 12, 2026. ## Why this matters This is lethality candor from the demand side. Where [[Alex Karp]] ("to scare enemies and, on occasion, kill them") and [[Palmer Luckey]] (the "warrior class… enthused and excited about enacting violence") supply the candor as *sellers*, Stanley supplies it as the *government official who signs the checks* — recasting mass AI-assisted targeting as an "appetite" the Pentagon must scramble to "satisfy," from "the lowest possible operator to the most senior commander." The metaphor is metabolic, not moral: killing at scale framed as consumer demand and a compute-supply problem, disclosed to a tech-industry expo as a selling point rather than a subject of restraint. That the man describing the appetite is the same man who built the tool that feeds it makes the receipt doubly telling. It belongs in [[The Violence Is the Point]]. ## Verification - **Reporting:** [Breaking Defense, May 12, 2026](https://breakingdefense.com/2026/05/insatiable-appetite-for-ai-maven-usage-surged-for-strikes-on-iran-pentagon-ai-chief-says/) (Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.), quoting Stanley's remarks to the SCSP AI+Expo. - **Status:** Verbatim, undisputed; delivered at a public conference and reported with direct quotation. ## Related quotes - [[Alex Karp - scare enemies and kill them]] — the seller's version, from Palantir's earnings call. - [[Palmer Luckey - warrior class enacting violence]] — the founder's enthusiasm.