The Pentagon’s Dangerous Rush to Adopt and Deploy AI into All Military Missions

And their idea is if they invest in 10 companies and one of them hits, they’ll get rich and they have this thing called the Valley of Death. How do you get from being a small tech company to getting Pentagon contracts? And their answer is you simplify the bidding process, you rig it, you put your people in government, you get rid of all kinds of regulations about “Does this thing work? Are they price gouging us?” You just basically create a system where you throw money at these tech companies and they say, “Trust us.” So that’s sort of the stage that we’re at and they’re very rhetorically at least, they look down on the old companies like Lockheed Martin, which of course has some purchase in Connecticut because they’re like, “Oh, they’re slow, they’re cumbersome, they don’t know the software, they don’t have the business model.” They should just get a participation trophy and go home.

But beneath that, they also do partner with them as subcontractors and on some of these things like Golden Dome, the impossible dream of this flawless missile defense that Trump is so fond of. The hardware will likely be made by the Raytheons and Lockheed Martins of the world and the software and the targeting and the systems integration will be done by firms like Palantir and Anduril (Industries) run by this 32-year-old gamer named Palmer Luckey and SpaceX and Elon Musk. So if they drive the budget high enough, they can keep both groups happy, the old guard and the new guard. If we actually put limits on the Pentagon budget, which would be a great idea, they might fight it out. At least they’d do some damage to each other’s reputations, some information would emerge. But at the rate they’re going, it’s more like a partnership or sort of like, well, it’s like fake wrestling, which Trump loves.

I mean, they’ll have rhetorical barbs, but they’ll laugh all the way to the bank.

Yeah, it’s really something that … And there’s been resistance in Silicon Valley. There was resistance to Google getting involved in drone targeting. There’s a No Tech for Apartheid organization. But people have been blacklisted in Silicon Valley for coming out against military work and so they’re kind of regrouping. And some of the smaller firms would rather be doing things like environmental research, but one of them was going to use their technology to track the state of the polar ice caps. And this VC firm said, “Oh God, no. I mean, that stuff would be as amazing military applications. Let’s give you money to do that. ” So the VC firms are shifting the balance in Silicon Valley in a more hawkish direction and they’re among the most vocal, not only about how the U.S. can dominate the world with the right technology, which has never happened and never will happen, but also they fancy themselves as some sort of techno gods.

We’re supposed to thank them for this. They’re saving us and by the way, we’re making Musk a trillonaire along the way.

It’s completely unhinged, which I said that about Palmer Luckey from Anduril and he started attacking me on X because he said I was a shill. And I said, “Well, who am I shilling for? The peace movement? What are you talking about? ” But anyway, the fact that he has time to do that is a bit scary, too, because he’s running this big company and he’s busy getting offended by articles in Tom Dispatch. So that’s the story unto itself. But anyway, yeah, that whole new surge of private money and I would say also that the tech sector is a lot more vocal about their prejudices and like Palmer Luckey goes on 60 Minutes and says, “We’re going to bury China” or “Palantir celebrates genocide in Gaza.” The head of Lockheed Martin would be more circumspect. He would like on the investor colleagues say, “Well, that turbulence in the Middle East will create a market for our products so we can help our allies promote …” They would try to cover it up with antiseptic language and the tech folks don’t do that.

I mean, it’s almost as bad as like Alice’s Restaurant, where they probably say, “I want to kill. I want to kill.” It’s not quite that bad, but it’s kind of their vibe.

And is there a big enough market doing non-military stuff for them to do that? There’s also a little wrinkle. I don’t know that Anthropic is a culprit here, but some of the tech firms want just enough regulation to keep smaller companies from getting in the game. So this discussion of regulation really needs … We need to know what they mean by that because I mean, there’s been bills about what kind of data they can collect on us, so that’s important. But if they can get boatloads of military money for things that aren’t even properly tested in a doctrine that says we’re going to use this technology to dominate the world, if you don’t stand up to all of that, then some of these smaller issues of regulation are going to get just blasted out of the water or cast aside.

So I think Anthropic, I think the workers movements that have come and gone about not doing this kind of work, I think there’s people in this sector who want to use AI for positive purposes. I think we’ve got to be a litle careful about that because even the so-called positive elements have their detriments. What if AI wrote everything for us, Shakespeare, whatever we wanted. Our skills with atrophy, that’s not a good thing. Or Elon Musk is, “Well, it may eliminate jobs where you can have guaranteed basic income.” A lot of people, work is tough, but a lot of people do build their identity around their work. If you have no job and no prospects and they give you a check once a month, what kind of life is that if it’s being run by the tech folks? So I think there’s a lot of issues, but I think there might be some positive elements in the use of some of this technology if it’s carefully monitored. But are those positive elements going to make you as much money as going all in on war?

So then it really comes down to, do you want to survive as a civilization and what kind of world we want to live in? What kind of human beings we want to be? And so it becomes very fundamental.

I would like these companies to be just another vendor. If you make something that works, we’ll buy it, otherwise shut up. You shouldn’t be running our foreign policy, shouldn’t be manipulating our budget, which means a lot of political reforms in terms of the back and forth of people from industry to government. Campaign finance reform, how these companies dominate government panels that make policies that then benefit them the way they fund think tanks that advocate for them. So there’s sort of that political side.

And then on the technical side, we need people who aren’t making bank off of this, evaluating whether it works, which probably means paying at least some small number of folks more in government to be on that side of the table instead of going to get rich in the tech sector or the venture capital sector. And Europe has tried to do more and I think that is changing now with this, “Oh, they must spend 5 percent of their economy on military hardware,” which is not going to protect them from Russia.

We’re not going to fight World War III. It’s going to be cyber attacks and political interference and a few people slipping across the board. It’s not going to be tanks rolling. They’re buying fighter planes in Europe. They’re going to be delivered eight years from now. Is that going to defend them from Russia? Is Russia going to go after a 30-member alliance when they couldn’t beat the country much smaller than them and what they thought was going to be an easy conflict? So the whole thing is a bit upside-down, but I think it is going to come back to questions of regulation.

And even in my congressional district, there’s a guy, Alex Boris, who had got the first AI regulation bill through a state legislature and Palantir was trying to take him down. The founder put out all this propaganda. Boris had worked for Palantir.

So Palantir said, “You can’t trust this guy because he worked for us and he’s behind ICE.” So it was the most diabolical thing ever. And people work in a Palantir are like, “Why is our founder saying we’re a bunch of murderers?” I mean, it was just, they’ll do anything. And in fact, anybody who stands up for regulation of AI is going to get the same treatment from these dark money operations.

I think one thing that works at our advantage is I think they’re so dishonest, they’re so diabolical, they’re so just unpleasant as human beings that they’re more galvanizing of an opposition than somebody who speaks in bland corporate language and slips you a dollar under the table. But that’s small solace if we don’t stop them. But I think there is a lot more interest in doing that and a lot of younger activists, first of all, they understand the technology better.

Second of all, they have a broader vision. They see the immigration crackdown and the wars overseas, especially the war at home, war abroad as linked and then they see that these same companies are profiting from both. For example, there’s an environmental group in South Texas that’s trying to block SpaceX from creating a larger space launch facility by grabbing some public lands. There’s a group in Ohio trying to block Anduril from building a big plant outside of Columbus. So there’s local resistance, there’s reason the tech sector, the resistance because they’re with what they’re doing to our budget. So all of this has to come together in a way that maybe it hasn’t before. And unfortunately, as you know, having better ideas is not enough in this world. If it was, we live in a much nicer planet, but so it’s about organizing and power and it’s a different kind of power we’re confronting and they’re throwing more at us every minute.

We’re kind of still getting our footing, but I think we will. I think we’ll find ways to fight back.