At Google’s campus in Mountain View, California, executives are trying to assuage thousands of employees protesting a contract with the Pentagon’s flagship artificial-intelligence initiative, Project Maven. Thousands of miles away, algorithms trained under Project Maven—which includes companies other than Google—are helping war fighters identify potential ISIS targets in video from drones.

The controversy around Silicon Valley’s cooperation with the military may intensify in coming months as Project Maven expands into new areas, including developing tools to more efficiently search captured hard drives. Funding for the project roughly doubled this year, to $131 million. Now the Pentagon is planning a new Joint Artificial Intelligence Center to serve all US military and intelligence agencies that may be modeled on Project Maven. “It’s exceeding my expectations,” says Bob Work, who established Project Maven in April 2017 while serving as deputy secretary of defense, before retiring later in the year.

Google’s precise role in Project Maven is unclear—neither the search company nor the Department of Defense will say. Two people familiar with the project said another company built the systems deployed on drone missions overseas.

Project Maven is formally known as the Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team. A seal for the group in a recent presentation, from project chief Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan, depicts a trio of cheery cartoon robots under a Latin motto that Google Translate renders as “Our job is to help.”

The seal for Project Maven. Department of Defense

The effort was created to demonstrate how the Pentagon could transform military operations by tapping AI technology already established in the private sector. On a trip to Silicon Valley last summer, Defense Secretary James Mattis lamented how his department lags the capabilities of tech companies he visited, such as Amazon and Google.

Processing drone video was selected as Project Maven’s first mission, Work says, because the Pentagon’s analysis tools can’t keep pace with the tidal wave of high-resolution aerial imagery swamping US bases. The plan was to deploy machine-learning techniques that internet companies use to distinguish cats and cars to spot and track objects of military interest, such as people, vehicles, and buildings. The initial goal was to have a system helping analysts in the field by December 2017.

That target was met handily. The Defense Department said in December that algorithms bought from unidentified contractors were helping on bases fighting ISIS. At a conference in Washington this month, Lt. Col. Garry Floyd said technology developed for Maven was being used by the US military’s Middle East and Africa commands, and had been expanded to a half-dozen combat locations. William Carter, deputy director of the technology policy program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, says that progress is remarkable for a department famed for glacial acquisitions processes. “By DoD standards, this is literally a work of magic,” says Carter, who has been briefed by Shanahan and others on Project Maven.