Most of GAO’s April 2026 report on federal AI acquisitions (GAO-26-107859) documents failure modes—programs that didn’t document lessons learned, contracts that lacked AI-specific terms, programs retired without institutional postmortems. Two acquisitions stand apart as comparative benchmarks: DOD’s Maven program and GSA’s USAi platform. The report uses them to illustrate what AI acquisition looks like when agencies have had time to learn from their own mistakes.

Maven

Project Maven is DOD’s longest-running high-profile AI acquisition. Managed by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, it uses machine learning and computer vision to analyze geospatial imagery and identify potential targets for human assessment. It has had a complicated history—including a period of public controversy over its AI ethics implications—but from an acquisition standpoint it represents an accumulation of hard-won institutional knowledge.