Why you seem to think Maven will target civilians is beyond me. If you build better recognition systems for drones they will be better able to mitigate collateral damage. Is this not exactly what you want?
Because it's for the US military. They have an unbelievably shitty track record in not hitting civilians. It was shitty under Obama, and it's gotten even shittier under Trump. And the issue isn't the ability to target better; it's that the military simply does not care.
No one is likely to write about "targets hit exactly as planned, no collateral damage" and even if they do as a puff piece for the military we're unlikely to remember that.
In contrast, every single mistargeting is plausibly worldwide news and our brains are wired to remember such things.
To be clear, I don't have any hard data either way. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's true given the asymmetry of typical cognitive bias in evaluating such a claim. The folk version of this is that you "only ever hear about the CIA's mistakes and not of their successes".
Pretty much is when the biggest risk to one side is from sitting on their butts remote piloting drones.