By Katrina Manson
Publication Date: 2026-03-23 10:00:00
Almost a year Later, on a hot day in midsummer 2025, I entered the 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 find out why Whitworth had changed his mind, how widespread Maven had become, and how Maven’s new supporters viewed the risks and benefits of integrating AI into military workflows.
By this point, Whitworth had become such a big fan of AI that his agency was issuing machine-generated intelligence reports to U.S. policymakers that “no human hand” had touched. And the NGA had secured a $708 million data labeling contract to support Maven’s computer vision models, the largest such call in U.S. history, which would ultimately go not to self-made billionaire Alexandr Wang’s Scale AI, but to Enabled Intelligence, a startup focused on hiring people on the autism spectrum, an expert in pattern recognition and comfortable with repetitive work.
My visit required all sorts of fanfare.
