Tech's dance with the Pentagon speeds up
Silicon Valley's on-again, off-again cycle of engagement with the U.S. military is swinging hard toward defense work.
The big picture: The Trump administration has opened the door to spending, the Pentagon is pushing modernization and a new era of instability and flash wars has engulfed the world just as AI is remaking the entire tech industry.
Driving the news: The Army announced earlier this month that four tech executives would become lieutenant colonels in the new Reserve Detachment 201: Meta CTO Adam Bosworth, OpenAI product head Kevin Weil, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar and Bob McGrew, a Palantir and OpenAI veteran.
The Detachment 201 project, whose genesis predates the second Trump administration, aims to fast-track the introduction of Silicon Valley expertise into the vast defense bureaucracy.
These new commissions put a human face on an epochal shift of tech industry energy into defense work.
Hardware firms are pushing aerospace projects, satellites and drones, autonomous vehicles and VR and AR headsets.
Software providers bring data collection, management and analysis tools for everything from Defense Department supply-chain management to cybersecurity to real-time battlefield decision making .
Meanwhile, everyone is promoting AI as the all-purpose answer to taming the Pentagon's vast unwieldy systems and unlocking a competitive edge for the U.S. in its global conflicts and rivalries, most urgently with China.
Last week DoD awarded a $200 million contract to OpenAI to "develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains."
Google and Anthropic are also working with the Pentagon.
Industry critics have painted this shift as a MAGA-fueled power grab by a new generation of contractors — like Palantir, Anduril and Elon Musk's companies — and investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Peter Thiel.
Yes, but: While those players are definitely making hay as their allies (former venture capitalist Vice President Vance, White House tech adviser David Sacks) have assumed power, tech's new defense mania is part of a decades-long oscillation by the industry.
Today's Silicon Valley got its start 75 years ago thanks to a flood of postwar defense contracting work that flowed toward Stanford and the nascent Santa Clara Valley electronics industry.
That engagement ebbed during the 1970s with stagflation and post-Vietnam cuts, surged again in the 1980s under Reagan's Cold War defense ramp-up, then dropped once more in the 1990s as the Soviet empire collapsed and the internet blossomed.
Post 9/11, many tech firms rushed to join the "global war on terror" — only to disengage once more as the U.S.'s Afghan and Iraq wars faltered.
Our thought bubble: Tech's reputation as a left-leaning industry — inspired by its San Francisco Bay Area roots and the counterculture heritage of both the personal computing and internet revolutions — is largely a myth.
Any time the federal government has been willing to throw dollars at defense technology, the tech industry has been eager to sell.
Between the lines: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's emphasis on a " culture of lethality" might once have raised hackles in tech boardrooms and among staff.
But AI companies — even those that put "safety" at the heart of their missions — are now rushing to compete for deals, as a call to patriotism has replaced an insistence on caution along the road to "superintelligence."
OpenAI, Google and other AI leaders who once had policies barring certain kinds of military and weapons work have removed or loosened those rules over the past two years.
What to watch: Support for the tech-Pentagon alliance — both inside firms and among the broader public — could splinter if AI, autonomous vehicles and other advanced tech plays a high-profile role in Trump administration immigration enforcement efforts or military deployments in U.S. cities.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
7 minutes ago
- The Hill
Fed's Powell repeats warning about tariffs as some GOP senators accuse him of bias
WASHINGTON (AP) — Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday that President Donald Trump's sweeping tariffs will likely push up inflation in the coming months, even as some Republican senators suggested the chair was biased against the duties. On the second day of his twice-yearly testimony before the House and Senate, Powell said that consumers will likely have to shoulder some of the cost of the import taxes. Most Fed officials support cutting rates this year, Powell added, but the central bank wants to take time to see how inflation changes in the months ahead. 'There will be some inflation from tariffs coming,' Powell said under questioning from members of the Senate Banking Committee. 'Not yet, but over the course of the coming months.' Powell noted that the duties would likely cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and 'some of that is going to fall on the consumer. We're just kind of waiting to see more data on that.' Some GOP senators criticized Powell, however, for characterizing tariffs as a potential driver of inflation. Sen. Pete Ricketts, a Republican from Nebraska, argued that the duties could simply act as a one-time increase in prices that wouldn't fuel inflation. And Sen. Bernie Moreno, a Republican from Ohio, echoed some of Trump's complaints about Powell's reluctance to cut rates and accused Powell of political bias. 'You should consider whether you are looking at this through a fiscal lens or a political lens because you just don't like tariffs,' Moreno said. Powell didn't respond. But the Fed chair reiterated that most central bank officials do support cutting the Fed's key rate this year. And Powell added that it is possible that tariffs won't increase inflation by very much. Trump has sharply criticized Powell for not reducing borrowing costs, calling him a 'numbskull' and a 'fool.' Trump has pushed for rate cuts in order to reduce the interest costs the federal government pays on its debt. Yet some Fed officials have pushed back against that view, saying that it's not their job to lower the government's borrowing costs. So far, inflation has steadily cooled this year despite widespread concerns among economists about the impact of tariffs. The consumer price index ticked up just 0.1% from April to May, the government said last week, a sign that price pressures are muted. Compared with a year ago, consumer prices rose 2.4% in May, up from a yearly increase of 2.3% in April. Yet most economists on Wall Street expect that Trump's tariffs will lift inflation this year, to about 3% to 3.5% by the end of this year.
Washington Post
11 minutes ago
- Washington Post
Bipartisan bill seeks to ban Chinese AI from federal agencies, as U.S. vows to win the AI race
WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of lawmakers on Wednesday vowed to keep Chinese artificial intelligence systems out of federal agencies while pledging to ensure the U.S. will prevail against China in the global AI competition. 'We are in a new Cold War, and AI is the strategic technology at the center,' Rep. John Moolenaar, the Republican chair of the House Select Committee on China, said as he opened a hearing on the matter. 'The future balance of power may very well be determined by who leads in AI.'
Boston Globe
12 minutes ago
- Boston Globe
Bipartisan bill seeks to ban Chinese AI from federal agencies, as US vows to win the AI race
Advertisement The ever-tighter race is now a central part of the US-China rivalry. And so much is at stake that the US must win, witnesses told the congressional panel. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up The two countries are 'in a long-term techno-security competition that will determine the shape of the global political order for the coming years,' said Thomas Mahnken, president and CEO of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Jack Clark, co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic, told the committee that AI has built-in values. 'I know that AI systems are a reflection of the societies that are built from. AI built in democracies will lead to better technology for all of humanity. AI built in authoritarian nations will... be inescapably intertwined and imbued with authoritarianism,' Clark said. 'We must take decisive action to ensure America prevails.' Advertisement Earlier this year, Chris Lehane, OpenAI's head of global affairs, told reporters in Paris that the US and China were the only two countries in the world that could build AI at scale. The competition, which he described as one between democratic AI and autocratic AI, is 'very real and very serious,' and the stakes are 'enormous,' he said, for 'the global rails of AI will be built by one of those two countries.' The 2025 AI Index Report by Stanford University's Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence center has the US in the lead in producing top AI models. But the report notes China is rapidly closing the performance gap, reaching near parity in 2024 on several major benchmarks. It also shows that China leads in AI publications and patents. At the hearing, Clark urged the lawmakers to maintain and strengthen export controls of advanced chips to China. 'This competition fundamentally runs on compute,' he said. The US must control the flow of powerful chips to China, Clark said, 'or else you're giving them the tools they will need to build powerful AI to harm American interests.' Mark Beall, Jr., president of government affairs at The AI Policy Network, said there are 'a number of very glaring gaps' in the US export controls that have allowed China to obtain controlled chips. Lawmakers earlier this year introduced a bill to track such chips to ensure they would not be diverted to the wrong hands. In another legislative step, Republican and Democratic lawmakers in both the House and the Senate on Wednesday introduced a bill to ban Chinese AI systems in the federal government. Advertisement 'The US must draw a hard line: hostile AI systems have no business operating inside our government,' Moolenaar said. The No Adversarial AI Act, as proposed, seeks to identify AI systems developed by foreign adversaries and ban their use in the US government, with exceptions for use in research and counter terrorism.
