Dataminr AI Goes Live Inside NATO's Maven Command System

American company Dataminr, a provider of commercial intelligence built on publicly available data, has announced a partnership of a scale it has never had with any military alliance before. Its First Alert Advanced artificial intelligence system has been integrated into NATO's Maven Smart System command platform, built jointly with Palantir. The news was confirmed to Breaking Defense by Dataminr CEO Ted Bailey.

What exactly went live

First Alert Advanced is a suite of autonomous "intelligence agents" that scan information streams, synthesize findings and generate ready-made, live briefings for analysts. The company describes this as "multimodal fusion" of open-source data with military sensors, meant to give commanders a situational picture updated with virtually no delay.

The system also uses a feature Dataminr calls "tactical predictive intelligence" - a module designed to forecast how events will unfold based on historical patterns before they actually happen. Bailey described this directly to Breaking Defense.

Patterns from the past have met a large language model, and they really can predict what's going to happen - Ted Bailey, CEO of Dataminr

Maven, NATO's shared brain

Maven Smart System is NATO's command-and-control platform, built through cooperation between the NATO Communications and Information Agency (NCIA), Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) and Palantir. The system uses machine learning models to fuse intelligence data, improve situational awareness, support operational planning and speed up commanders' decision-making. Bringing in an outside open-source data provider like Dataminr means the alliance is now combining commercial data with military sensors within a single analytical environment.

Bailey underscored the scale of the relationship with the alliance: "NATO is our second-largest customer, and now NATO is also a customer of First Alert Advanced," he said, quoted by Breaking Defense. Dataminr has worked with NATO for several years, supplying alerts about threats to critical infrastructure and allied forces, but the integration with Maven marks a far tighter connection to the command system than previous arrangements.

A parallel contract with the Pentagon

At the same time, the US Air Force awarded Dataminr a five-year contract worth nearly $318 million under the A2 Publicly Available Information Alerting program. The deal, chosen from among eight bids, covers all commands and field units of the Department of War and could extend to as many as three million licensed users. Work is scheduled to run through June 2031.

This is already the third successively larger Air Force contract with Dataminr for the same mission of alerting on global events, following $258.7 million in 2020 and $298.8 million in 2021. Bailey called the new contract "a landmark validation of Dataminr's position as the real-time alerting system" for military operations.

Questions about oversight

The expansion of the system has also drawn criticism. Tech Times noted that Dataminr has a documented history of supplying US police with alerts about planned citizen protests before they even began, and the new contract introduces no additional mechanisms for public oversight of how data reaching the military and law enforcement is used. Critics point to a tension between the contract's stated purpose, protecting forces and infrastructure abroad, and the practice of monitoring domestic gatherings.

For NATO and the Pentagon, integrating commercial open-source intelligence into command systems is part of a broader trend: the alliance and the US military are increasingly turning to ready-made AI platforms from technology companies rather than building their own analytical systems from scratch. Palantir itself already went down a similar path, with its Maven Smart System becoming the backbone onto which further data layers, such as Dataminr's, are now being attached.

For Polish readers, it matters that Poland, as a NATO member, uses the same shared command system into which data processed by commercial artificial intelligence is now flowing. This means decisions about the scale and manner of using such tools are made at the alliance level rather than by individual capitals, raising questions about who actually controls the quality and origin of the data feeding NATO's shared situational picture.