Tech's dance with the Pentagon speeds up
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.
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