New Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse just dropped: According to the Financial Times, major defense technology companies Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril are in conversations with SpaceX and OpenAI (among other tech players) to form a consortium to bid for US government defense contracts.
The goal of the group, which reportedly plans to announce its membership as soon as January, is to disrupt the “prime” contractors who have a habit of scoring major deals with the Pentagon. In the crosshairs of the consortium, there’s Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing.
There is little question that the legacy brands do well bidding on defense work. According to the Department of Defense’s Fiscal Year 2023 review, Lockheed Martin took home $61.4 billion, RTX (née Raytheon) scored $24.1 billion, and Boeing got a cool $20.1 billion. In 2021, 71% of all of Lockheed Martin’s revenue came from contracts with the US government. Just under 50% of all annual sales for Boeing and RTX went to the feds during the same time period. As The American Prospect has previously pointed out, these are basically state-funded companies but the government has no real control over operations or leadership.
So would the safety and security of the country improve by disrupting the big three’s vice grip on the Pentagon? Probably, under the assumption that mass-producing weapons of war and supplying them to allies for conflicts that range from mostly just to genocidal is a net positive on national security, which, let’s call that dubious.
But this particular collection of tech firms as the hammer to bash the oligopoly? It’s not clear that this is an improvement upon the status quo.
Palantir has carved itself out a niche as the Defense Department’s go-to for AI systems. Just this year, it snagged a $100 million contract to build the military AI-powered targeting tools and $480 million to expand the Pentagon’s data analysis and decision making tools. The company has been more than happy to lend its tech to programs that are at best ethically questionable, including being the technological backbone of the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, helping lead to the breakup of migrant families and facilitating mass raids that led to the separation of children and parents. The company’s technology has also been central to Israel’s ongoing seige in Gaza that has killed over 45,000 people.
Anduril, called “tech’s most controversial startup” by Bloomberg, has built sensor towers for use on the US-Mexico border to track migrants and has explored the development of autonomous weapons. The company’s big play is building drones for warfare, but it also has its eyes on building surveillance satellites, all of which carry some serious ethical questions attached.
OpenAI recently announced a partnership with Anduril to work on anti-drone systems, but it seems likely that will be the first of many collaborations if the consortium comes together. The agreement, which has caused some upheaval among OpenAI employees who don’t particularly want to be involved in doing defense work, comes after OpenAI quietly removed language from its usage policy restricting the use of its technology for military and warfare purposes.
And on top of all that, It’s Peter Thiel all the way down, baby. Thiel, the techno-libertarian lizard man who has not-so-quietly been trying to place his acolytes in as many branches of government as possible, has his hands in basically all of these firms. He founded Palantir, co-founded OpenAI, put major financial backing behind Anduril, and was an early-stage investor in SpaceX. He’s proven himself to be a less-than-scrupulous person with an ideology that can far-too-generously be summed up as “technological progress no matter the human cost.” Thiel’s biographer, Max Chafkin, told Time that Thiel is worth fearing, stating, “When you combine the hostility to democracy and institutional norms with the bankroll of a billionaire you can potentially do some damage.”
Suddenly, maybe the malignant but status quo evil of the old school defense contractors doesn’t seem quite as bad.
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