Cameron Stanley is the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAO) of the United States Department of Defense, which the department's own materials now style the Department of War, and heads the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. He took the post on January 12, 2026, succeeding Douglas Matty after a period in which Andrew Mapes served as acting CDAO (Source: en.wikipedia.org; defensescoop.com). A former chief of Project Maven, he has been the department's main public spokesman in 2026 on the Maven Smart System, the GenAI.mil platform, the department's use of models from several frontier developers, and the changes to targeting that followed the February 28, 2026 strike on a school in Minab, Iran.
| Office | Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer, Department of Defense / Department of War |
| In office | From January 12, 2026 |
| Also | Senior Official for the Applied Artificial Intelligence Critical Technology Area |
| Predecessor | Douglas Matty (April–December 2025); Andrew Mapes acting in the interval |
| Education | United States Air Force Academy |
Background
The department's official biography gives Stanley's title as Senior Official for the Applied Artificial Intelligence Critical Technology Area. It states that he served as Chief of the Algorithmic Warfare Cross Functional Team, known as Project Maven, from 2021 to 2022, which it describes as "the data and AI pathfinder program tasked with enabling improved warfighter outcomes through the development, deployment, and sustainment of rapidly fielded AI algorithms," and as Chief Data Officer of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security from 2022 to 2024. Earlier roles it lists are Senior Science and Technology Advisor to the Command at U.S. Southern Command, Senior JIEDDO Representative to the United Kingdom, and Chief of the JIEDDO Technology Strategy Division. Immediately before his appointment he was National Security Transformation Lead at Amazon Web Services (Source: war.gov). GovCon Wire, drawing on his LinkedIn profile, reports that he began his career as a U.S. Air Force lieutenant and later worked at Concurrent Technologies and at Booz Allen Hamilton, where he worked with DARPA on counter-IED and sensor technologies (Source: govconwire.com).
DefenseScoop reported on January 7, 2026, citing three anonymous sources, that Stanley was the frontrunner for the CDAO post. The same report described the context: an August 2025 restructuring ordered by Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg that placed the CDAO under the research and engineering undersecretariat, and a departure of senior staff from the office during 2025 (Source: defensescoop.com). He succeeded Douglas Matty, who was CDAO from April 21 to December 17, 2025; Andrew Mapes served as acting CDAO between Matty's departure and Stanley's arrival (Source: defensescoop.com; en.wikipedia.org). Matty had in turn followed Radha Plumb, who left the post on January 14, 2025. Stanley is the sixth director counted across the office and its predecessor, the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (Source: en.wikipedia.org).
Maven Smart System and targeting
In an April 12, 2026 New York Times account of AI use in the opening weeks of the Iran campaign, Stanley called the capabilities of Maven, the targeting program run by Palantir, "revolutionary" (Mutually Automated Destruction: The Escalating Global A.I. Arms Race (NYT)). At the AWS summit on June 30, 2026 he said a new "Agent Network" and "war data platform," built with AWS, Palantir and Anduril, were enabling near-instant kill-chain targeting decisions, and officials said they were seeking to make the pilot a program of record (Source: insideaipolicy.com).
At the Billington CyberSecurity Summit in Washington on September 8, 2026, Stanley said the Maven Smart System had replaced "six, eight, ten" separate IT systems that personnel previously used to analyze data, and that the department was extending it to force readiness, supply chain, budgetary considerations, and modeling and simulation (Source: defenseone.com).
U.S. Central Command's changes to its lethal targeting process after the Minab school strike became public on September 22, 2026. According to U.S. officials, the changes include dozens of upgrades to the Maven Smart System; Stanley said the upgrades include feeds tracking civilian maritime traffic; Bloomberg also reported that he has said Maven enabled the 1,000 targets the United States struck on February 28 (Source: bloomberg.com). The strike and the questions Congress put to the department about Maven's role are covered on DOD — Department of Defense (AI Deployer) and House Democrats' letter to Secretary Hegseth on civilian harm in Operation Epic Fury (2026). See also Autonomous Weapons.
Frontier-model procurement and GenAI.mil
On April 28, 2026, after the department's designation of Anthropic as a supply-chain risk, Stanley confirmed that the department was expanding its use of Google's Gemini, saying "overreliance on one vendor is never a good thing" (Source: cnbc.com; see Google DeepMind and Clawed). At the Billington summit in September he said GenAI.mil, the department's main portal for AI tools, had recently added tools from OpenAI and xAI alongside Gemini. He said recent use of other transaction authorities and marketplaces had shortened vendor selection "from months to single-digit days," while the full path from a broad agency announcement to an authority to operate "could be 18 months" (Source: defenseone.com). The department reports that more than 1.3 million personnel have used GenAI.mil; these are its own figures (Defense / Military — AI Deployment; Source: war.gov).
Addressing the Potomac Officers Club's AI summit on March 18, 2026, Stanley described the department's prior approach to AI as "piecemeal" and siloed and said the new approach aims to provide every military and civilian component with AI for "every workload" (Source: govconwire.com).
Compute
At the National Defense Industrial Association's emerging technology conference on September 9, 2026, Stanley said the department needs significantly more computing capacity to accelerate military AI adoption, citing "a ridiculous amount of consumption across private industry and everywhere else," and that it is seeking congressional authority to reprogram $600 million to establish a new classified AI compute center. Only the lede of the trade-press account was retrievable, so the timing and status of the request are not established (Source: insideaipolicy.com). See Compute Governance.
International cooperation
On September 22, 2026 the UK government announced a new AI and autonomy partnership under which the Ministry of Defence's Rapid AI Delivery Taskforce and the Department of War's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office will work together on "trusted, interoperable capabilities"; the announcement was made during Prime Minister Andy Burnham's visit to the UN General Assembly (Source: gov.uk).
Relationships
- related: Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) — heads the office
- related: Chief Digital and AI Office (CDAO) — office holders list
- related: Radha Plumb — CDAO 2024–2025, before Matty
- related: DOD — Department of Defense (AI Deployer) — department; Minab strike and Maven targeting changes
- related: Defense / Military — AI Deployment — GenAI.mil adoption
- related: Palantir Technologies — Maven Smart System contractor
- related: Google DeepMind — Gemini expansion he confirmed in April 2026
- related: Mutually Automated Destruction: The Escalating Global A.I. Arms Race (NYT) — quoted on Maven
- related: House Democrats' letter to Secretary Hegseth on civilian harm in Operation Epic Fury (2026) — congressional questions on Maven and Minab
- related: Autonomous Weapons
- related: Andy Burnham — UK–US AI and autonomy partnership involving his office