CDAO

The Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, known as the CDAO, is the US Department of Defense’s central organisation for artificial intelligence and data. It was established in February 2022 and reached full operating capability that June, formed by merging four existing bodies — the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the Defense Digital Service, the office of the Chief Data Officer, and the Office of Advancing Analytics — into a single shop reporting directly to the Deputy Secretary of Defense. Its first chief was Craig Martell, a former machine-learning executive; he was succeeded by Radha Iyengar Plumb in April 2024, and Cameron Stanley, who previously led the team behind Project Maven, was named to the role in January 2026.

The office’s most visible product is the Maven Smart System , the AI data-fusion and targeting platform that grew out of the original Project Maven computer-vision effort. CDAO builds it with Palantir under a contract whose ceiling was raised to nearly $1.3 billion in 2025; by that May the system reportedly had more than 20,000 active users across five combatant commands. In 2026 the Pentagon directed the Maven Smart System to become a program of record with oversight consolidated under CDAO.

Beyond Maven, CDAO owns the department’s data and AI strategy and its Responsible AI work, publishing the Responsible AI Strategy and Implementation Pathway in 2022 and a supporting toolkit. It runs the Global Information Dominance Experiments, a roughly quarterly series used to build out Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control, and the Open DAGIR data ecosystem. It also stood up Task Force Lima in 2023 to assess generative AI, work that later passed to an AI Rapid Capabilities Cell. The office sits at the centre of the Pentagon’s effort to turn a sprawling set of AI experiments into systems the armed forces can field at scale.