Tech Won't Save Us - The New Military Industry Complex w/ Sam Biddle

Episode Date: June 5, 2025

Paris Marx is joined by Sam Biddle to discuss how Silicon Valley is shamelessly courting government military contracts, using tactics to silence employee dissent and normalize the situation to the public, and what it all means for the future of military geopolitics.Sam Biddle is a senior technology reporter at The Intercept.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Kyla Hewson.Also mentioned in this episode:Sam wrote about how defense tech companies sought to capitalize on Trump’s return to office and OpenAI’s embrace of nationalism.Trae Stephens was interviewed by Wired last year, where he made his comments about the military industrial complex.Meta and Anduril teamed up to provide VR and AR devices to the US military.Trump’s US Army appointee won’t give up his Anduril stock.Palantir’s CEO wrote the Defense Reformation report and Andreessen Horowitz launched an American Dynamism division.Support the show

I think it is worth questioning to what extent it is possible to reconcile a mission of benefiting all of humanity and a mission of benefiting the military of one individual country. I would suggest that it is not possible to reconcile. Those two things are irreconcilable. You have to sort of choose whether you're team world or team America. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Sam Biddle. Sam is a senior technology reporter at The Intercept. There are many stories dominating the growing relationship between Silicon Valley, the Trump administration, and, you know, this extreme right wing more generally. We've talked about Doge. We've talked about the consequences

for the American government. Obviously, there's a lot of talk about the trade war, but one aspect of this that probably isn't getting the attention that it deserves is the growing effort by a number of companies and influential people in the tech industry to remake the way that military contracting works in the United States. As you're probably aware, hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year to support the American military to make sure it has the hardware and the software that it needs. And the tech industry wants a bigger piece of that pie. So they are arguing that they would do this much more efficiently

than the existing companies that tend to get those contracts and that it's about time that the military get more innovative, more cutting edge, embrace these AI tools and these new ways of making weapons that the tech industry says it can deliver. Now, obviously, that is a big shift from the way the tech industry used to want to position itself. And previously, there would be a bit of a clash as to which side of the tech industry might win out here. You know, these new right-wing folks or the more libertarian arguments that we might have heard in the past that wanted to present themselves as not so linked to the US government or supporting its priorities. But in actual fact, the tech industry has been moving in this direction for quite some time. And as we know, Silicon Valley itself basically owes

its existence to a bunch of public and government funding in the Second World War and the Cold War to build up what has now become Silicon Valley as we know it today. And instead of rejecting that history, these people associated with companies like Palantir and Anduril are saying that it needs to be embraced, that Silicon Valley needs to go back to thinking about that way again, to embrace US national security and enhancing US power in the 21st century, especially in the face of rising China. And they intend to profit fabulously from that. But of course, it also presents a lot of concerns about the way those technologies are going to be used, about the vision of the world that this tech industry is now promoting, not just to government, but to society more broadly,

the people who are listening to them, a more warlike and aggressive world that creates many more customers for the types of products that they are producing and hoping governments and militaries are going to buy. So obviously, I think this is something we should be paying a lot more attention to. And that's why I was really happy to have Sam on the show so we could dig into this further, so we could understand it better. And I have no doubt this is going to be an issue that we'll be returning to on the show in the months to come. If you like this conversation, make sure to leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making Tech

Won't Save Us every single week, so we can keep having these in-depth critical conversations on the tech industry, especially at this moment where it is embracing the extreme right around the world. You can join supporters like Max from Berlin, Jean-Philippe from Montreal, Malta from Montpellier in France, Vitor from Sao Paulo, Chad from Kawichi, and Ethan in Baltimore by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Sam, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I am delighted to be here. Thank you.

We have been trying to organize having you on the show for a little while, you know, finding the right topic in the right time. And so I'm really excited to have you on the show today. And I think that we have, you know, a concerning but really interesting set of issues to talk about. We're going to get to what basically these new defense tech companies are doing to try to remake military procurement and the bigger picture of that. But I wanted to start with something a bit more topical, something that, you know, is just kind of happening. And that's obviously Elon Musk saying that he is leaving the government and leaving Doge after several months of leading

this agency. And of course, all of the consequences that we have seen of that, all of the cuts to not just staff, but of government departments wholesale and a funding of international programs and all these sorts of things. So I'm just wondering, you know, what you think the consequences of Musk's engagement in this are, and do you really buy that he's leaving this all behind now? I mean, I think the most important thing to bear in mind whenever Musk says, I mean, literally anything is he lies constantly or at the very least makes very, very unrealistic predictions that don't pan out. And these predictions tend to be self-beneficial in

some way, right? It's like Tesla cars will be capable of orbiting the moon by next summer. Whatever makes him look good in his forward looking, I think should be treated with extreme skepticism. It's nothing personal. It's just his track record is very, very, very bad when it comes to factuality. And so, yeah, when he says he's leaving government, I don't think anyone should believe that. As far as the results, I think that he's been very fortunate to have the sort of Doge legacy assessed at its word. You know, it's so many of the articles about, you know, well, did Doge succeed or not are looking at it in terms of did doge find and eliminate federal waste and like no the point of it was just to like wreck shit and i think by that metric it was a colossal success it is really wrecked it's wrecked a lot of offices of the federal government and i think that was

the point so by those metrics it was a huge success but no I don't think he's – look, I think he's leaving DC with the same – as much as I believe that he's going to Mars. Maybe, but I will believe anything that he says when it happens. And so, no, I don't think anyone should think he's not really gone, right? Right. I mean, at his goodbye, at his farewell little ceremony in the Oval Office, he says he's not even leaving. So, yeah. And, you know, as long as he has underlings embedded in the government, whether he is personally present in Washington, D.C. is, I think, a trivial point. Whether he's able to still continue to wreck shit is, I think, what matters. And as far as it seems like as far as Trump is concerned, the work will go on. The work of, to the extent possible before judges halt it, they will continue to try to wreck things. Yeah. It's like Doge is just another one of the many companies in his orbit that he has his kind of fingers in. He has his underlings going to work

in. It doesn't mean that he needs to be actually there all the time. He is still having influence. And I would say for someone like Elon Musk, on the one hand, there is the desire to present in particular for Tesla investors, this notion that he is not always doing these Doge things anymore, that he's going to be more focused on Tesla because of the difficulties that that company has had. But then, you know, he doesn't want to give up this influence in the US government that gives him a lot of authority and leverage to try to shape regulatory

issues, to try to shape the types of things that are going to affect his companies, and to make sure that the agencies that would be most likely to be doing some of that stuff are going to continue to be disempowered, going to be kind of struggling for their relevance, their autonomy. And he can keep doing that by still having some fingers in the Doge pie, basically. I mean, right. Why would he walk away from that? If you are the richest man on the planet and you have found a way to bring the most powerful country on the planet to heal in accordance with your business interests, knowing what we know about Elon Musk, why would he lay that power down and walk away from it? I think, as you point out, it would be a mistake to view this as anything other than Tesla shareholder damage control and maybe to calm

people down around SpaceX stuff too. But no, this is a reaction to the Tesla share, to their last quarterly report and shareholder anxiety. Knowing what we know about Tesla shareholders too, it'll probably work. I think, or at least for a while, that is such a personality driven company. I mean, their share price is really just like a reflection of what do people think about Elon Musk? What do shareholders, how much faith do they still have in the man? I think it is just a, he knows that if he says that, it'll at least get people off his back for a little bit. Yeah. It feels like we're pivoting from stage one of Elon Musk and Doge to some sort of stage two, and we need to see what this is ultimately going to look like. But I think one of the key things is to ensure he is

not allowed to rebrand himself, to act as though Doge is some great success, to walk away from the many consequences that have come of the decisions that he has made and that this kind of government department have made under his leadership that have actually caused a lot of harm, not just within the United States, but around the world with people losing access to medications and food and all these other things, just so he can have this platform to say that he is improving the government and to make sure that these agencies are not going after his companies. Well, there has been a lot of damage that has been caused as a result of that. And he can't just be allowed to go back and pretend that he is the rocket man and the electric car guy and all that kind of stuff.

Yeah. I mean, I think all the time about during the first Trump term, maybe like right when he was first elected, I remember Steve Bannon talking about how the plan was or the ambition was to quote unquote dismantle the administrative state. And they didn't do it last time around, but I think Doge has given the MAGA movement its best shot at that Bannonite mission of dismantling the government just by throwing as many wrenches into the works as possible. And yeah, like I said, by that metric, it's been very, very successful. I mean, I think it's pretty easy to wreck things, right? Like you just fire all the people, slash all the budgets and wait for, you know, a lot of the stuff has already been either paused or reversed by judges. But, you know, that takes time to shake out. You know, as we've said, there's no indication that the actual work on the ground of stomping on things will stop. I mean, they don't need Elon Musk to do any of that, really. And maybe it's gotten to the point where he's sort of a distraction from that goal of dismantling the administrative state. Maybe it took him being in D.C. to get, I don't know, to get buy-in from the rest of the party.

Yeah, no, I mean, the work will continue in earnest, I think. And Wired has had some good reporting about how so many of his underlings are still embedded in the offices where they were dispatched and continue to move around to different agencies. The foot soldiers are the ones who are accomplishing the smashing, not Elon himself. He just shows up to those strange cabinet meetings and stands there and receives the praise for it. I'd be very upset if I were one of the Doge goons, you know, that you don't get any of the glory, right? Like it's maybe they hope it's like a down payment on a future job at like, you know, SpaceX or Tesla or something like that. Right. Yeah. I have no doubt that they will have very promising careers after this, after their service in government.

Yeah. Oh, my. Well, yeah. You know, I wanted to talk about it to get your view, because this is something big that is happening. Obviously, we've been talking a lot about what Elon Musk has been doing in this role. And now it'll be interesting to see how this relationship continues, how it looks in this kind of slightly different form. I don't think that means that this relationship between the Trump administration and Silicon Valley is over. And, you know, that's part of the reason I wanted to have you on the show today, because there's this other aspect to this that I feel like, as we've been paying attention to Doge, and as we've been paying attention to tariffs, there's this other whole story that probably isn't getting the attention that it should be getting,

because it is actually going to be incredibly consequential. And this is this push by a number of tech companies and investors and tech billionaires to really remake how military procurement is happening in the United States. So what is happening on that front? Give us the lay of the land and then we'll kind of dig into the specifics. Yeah, it really just goes to Peter Thiel and people who have been orbiting him for many years, largely alumni of Palantir, his data analysis firm. But people close to Thiel and his investment fund have radiated outwards into this new renaissance of military tech startups. And they all have a pretty common rhetorical refrain, which is that federal defense contracting is broken and wasteful and a national disgrace that we sink

billions, trillions of dollars over the long run into weapons programs that don't work or aren't needed or pad the pockets of lobbyists and executives and et cetera, et cetera. And it's basically a stain on the United States that the country is so beholden to weapons interests, which is all true, which is all completely true. Their solution, however, is to say it should be us instead of Lockheed. It is a really fascinating, very kind of Trumpian approach to where you identify a very real problem and you pledge that you are the one to do it. It's an almost populist approach to defense contracting, where they're positioning it as the teal acolytes, I'll say this is a waste of taxpayer money, right? Like the little people are getting screwed and the country is being left in danger. But yeah, but their solution is completely self-serving. There was a really fascinating interview with

Trey Stevens, who is a central figure here, very close Peter Teal ally, longtime player in defense tech, who is an executive at Anduril, an arms maker, co-founder and current executive at Anduril. Anyway, he had an interview with Wired maybe last year, in which he's asked about the old Eisenhower farewell speech about the military industrial complex. And he says, oh my God, I love that speech. I listen to it every year. It's so important. And what Eisenhower was warning against was Lockheed, where you have this revolving door between military contracting and the state. We're so against that. And then later in the interview, he's asked if he would serve in the Trump administration. He says, basically, I've called upon and I will serve. It had to have been one of the least self-aware interviews I've read in my life. It was a first, I think, to hear a defense contractor rail against

the military industrial complex with zero detectable irony. And I think that sort of encapsulates the whole phenomenon that we're talking about here today. Yeah, it's hilarious, right? Because they think that they're somehow separate from the other traditional military industrial complex, even though they just want to do the exact same thing, have the same kind of relationships. But they'll say they'll do it better. Right. And they're not the problems. It's the old guard that is the problem. That's exactly right. That's a perfect way of putting it. It's not that the military industrial complex is bad. It's that we would do a better job as the complex. The incumbents are bloated and corrupt and can't deliver, but we can. So it is not at all a pitch to dismantle the military-industrial complex or to decouple the national interest from national security considerations or military-industrial considerations. It's just

we would do a better job running this machine. And, you know, and maybe they would, but that is a very different pitch than the one you see in marketing materials, where it seems like they're proposing like a total rethinking of how the military and the state and the private sector all interact. And, you know, and to some extent they are, but I've never seen so many people criticize Lockheed while also clearly very much wanting to be Lockheed. And, you know, they're making a lot of progress. So I think it is worth taking very seriously the ambitions of Palantir and Anduril, specifically those two. They're quite notable here, but there's also a constellation of smaller startups that share that thinking. Definitely. Yeah. It's like, you know, don't get rid of the military industrial complex,

just instead of relying on Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and Boeing and, you know, these other like traditional aerospace and defense companies, you know, start swapping out the contracts that go to them with contracts to Anduril and Palantir and SpaceX. And, you know, as you were saying, these other companies, I want to get to that framing that they use. I want to dig into that a little bit more. But before I want to understand a bit more about who these people are and the relationship that they have to the Trump administration. So like who are some of the key figures here beyond the ones that you just mentioned? And how are we seeing them like embed in the Trump administration and grow their relationships to try to make sure that this ambition that they have is realized. Yeah, sure. So, I mean, Trey Stevens, who I mentioned before, major player here, Palmer Luckey, the founder of Andrill. It has so much executive overlap with Palantir that it's

almost an offshoot. Palmer Luckey is a major one. He is a longtime Trump supporter, Trump fundraiser. Sort of his origin story, founding mythology is that he was fired from Facebook, as it was known at the time, for running like an anti-Hillary Clinton meme campaign. Was very abruptly fired by Facebook over that back when such a thing could get you fired, which feels very quaint. That was like back in 2016. It was really interesting to think about that the other day when Andrew and Meta and Palmer Lucky and Mark Zuckerberg announced this new partnership on. Oh, my God. Yeah. What XR for military. I can't even remember what XR

stands for. It was like augmented reality goggles for soldiers. Yeah. Yeah. Right. I mean, basically Andrew blowing up wasn't no pun intended, was in no small part. I mean, I think I think the company owes a lot culturally to this origin story of, oh, I got canceled and silenced by Facebook for being a Trump supporter in Silicon Valley in 2016 was categorically different than it is today. I do believe what he says that he was fired for that. But I think that being – it's sort of like if Barry Weiss were making missiles, right? She got to leave the – so much of her shtick is like, oh, I left – I was forced out of the New York Times because they couldn't handle my truth. And I think that doing the sort of like, I was forced out of the liberal establishment thing gives you a ton of cred in that world. So anyway, yeah, Palantir CEO, Alex Karp, who's fascinating because he is ostensibly a Democrat, describes himself as a lifelong Democrat, but then goes on these strange rants about the pagan woke cult that the country is. He's described as pagan on multiple occasions. You know, he's the kind of, Karp is the kind of guy who during earnings calls will talk about, you know, the thrill of killing.

I mean, it's a lot of violent rhetoric in his investor calls, leaning into this kind of Italian futurist, fascist warrior mindset kind of thing. Marc Andreessen, I think, is a very important player here. The mega legendary venture capitalist who has taken a hard right turn at the same time that Andreessen Horowitz has really become a full-throated, has a very full-throated embrace of military contracting and has really embraced jingoism as a kind of corporate identity. But again, I think it really is a – this influence radiates outward from Peter Thiel directly. And so many of the investors,

Joe Lonsdale, another investor who is, again, a close Teal ally and has become a pretty significant defense tech VC in his own right through his fund. Yeah, but all roads lead back to Teal. And do we actually see evidence that they are successfully getting into the Trump administration and the government trying to reshape how the military thinks about contracting, what they're talking about, where some of these contracts are going? Well, what we know for sure now is that in the early days of the administration and during the transition after the election, some of these figures that I've just mentioned have gone either on the record or it was reported that they were

consulting with the incoming administration about Pentagon staffing choices. There was an interview Palmer Luckey did with, I believe it was CNBC, where he says something like that, you know, he's heard, this was, I think this was before Trump was even inaugurated, you know, that he was aware of some of the people being floated for top DOD positions. And he's like, you know, I'm not going to get into it, but I would be happy with any of them. So, you know, yes, there are many indications that they have been able to exert their influence even this early in the administration. Also worth pointing out that the Trump's nominee for undersecretary of the army, which is a very important position, is an Andral executive. And I reported a few weeks ago that in his federal ethics disclosure,

he said bucking decades of ethical norms that he would not be divesting his Andoril stock and would retain his financial stake in a company that has many extensive, very expensive contracts with the army. So this is someone in a position to have a major hand in the discussions about what the army purchases, who will hold stock in a company that sells things to the army. So yeah, I think that that is self explanatory, why that would be of concern. Totally. It's just another small example of how, you know, these kind of ethics expectations are just completely gone out the window with the Trump administration and everything that they're doing. I feel like for me, when I started

to come across these ideas was often reading things from Palantir executives, right? You know, there was this report or whatever you want to call it called the defense reformation put out by Shyam Sankar, the Palantir CEO near the end of last year, October of 2024. And then of course, there was this book that was co-written, I guess, by Alex Karp and Nicholas Zamiska called The Technological Republic. And effectively in these documents, they are laying out some of the vision that you described earlier, right? Positioning China as this threat and needing the United States to basically maintain its power into the 21st century and how Silicon Valley should be a key part of that agenda, right? How it needs to refocus away from consumer products

and this sort of more libertarian, semi-progressive politics that it used to espouse in the past to really embrace the military-industrial complex, to really embrace the US state and its role in the world. It was a bit startling to see how full-throated and how open they were about those things, but also then to see how much that view has grown. So what have you made of what we've been seeing there and the argument that they have been making in order to justify this significant shift? What's really interesting to me is trying to discern between who genuinely believes this stuff and where there is perhaps opportunism here. I mean, I think that Mark Zuckerberg has provided a really good example of just how malleable some

of these people are. I mean, you've seen every couple of months he has like a new personality and wardrobe and haircut to sort of depending on what's happening that in any given week. That's just what real men do. Do you remember when he was really into like he went through a phase of raising and killing chickens in his backyard. He had like a big like backyard horizontally integrated barbecue set up where he was like really into, he thought it was like really manly to just be like, I ripped this chicken's head off today and made nuggets. I think that now Zuckerberg is defense contractor, same dynamic, but you know, it's, I don't think it's to look cool as he has or to try to look cool as he has so frequently attempted. You know, I think that Meta sees that the climate, the political winds are blowing in a very different direction.

And now they can get into the defense contracting game without a ton of backlash. I see that as of a different kind than what you see coming out of Palantir. So just to say, I think it's worth distinguishing between who is jumping on this train and who is actually pushing it forward. So you mentioned China, and I think that none of this is possible without China. All of these arguments of rearming, of rebuilding the arsenal of democracy, as Andrel loves to say, you do not have this defense tech renaissance in terms of corporate culture, in terms of where VCs are putting money, in terms of what Washington has embraced. None of that happens without China and without the specter of imminent war with China. The big manifesto in this world was the Andreessen Horowitz American Dynamism Manifesto, which is just a fascinating and bizarre document.

But these are all centered around countering Chinese, and specifically communist Chinese aggression. You will always see these people – whenever you see someone saying CCP and PRC all the time, odds are you are in a defense tech-friendly space. I mean, you know, that's not completely true, but it is very unsubtle Red Scare shit and just sort of reheating of very, very, very familiar Cold War rhetoric. And, you know, and it worked last time, right? If you have a terrifying communist enemy on the other side of the planet within it, you know, and we're warned they're building and building and building and we need to build too to keep pace. That's proven in history to be very effective. So that is a huge part of the pitch is if we don't do this stuff, China is going to and we can't lose and everything's a race. A lot of the people that we've been talking about so far are on the

American, part of the American political rights, if not openly supportive of Donald Trump, then at least friendly to his administration. But I will say the China hawk stuff is not exclusive by any means to the right. And I think that's a big place where this big new wave of defense tech spending and investing has made a lot of progress is in pitching itself as something apolitical, right? Like being afraid of China is not a Republican project. It's not a democratic project. It's an American bipartisan political project that I think maybe just the right is exploiting a little bit better right now and more fruitfully. I feel like for me, you have this discourse about China now that really comes out of the fact that in part, the tech industry recognized that when the

antitrust investigations were ramping up and the efforts for regulation that they needed a story in order to justify the size and power that they've accumulated. And they landed on China because that was becoming a bigger concern in the United States. And they said, okay, if we position China as the big enemy, as its tech industry, being a big threat to the US tech industry, then this helps us to argue against regulation and against antitrust and breakups and all this sort of thing, because we are necessary in order to defend the United States against China and China's growing geopolitical position. And I feel like making this a bipartisan argument for me really comes out of this debate

between Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt. I don't know if you remember, in 2019, Peter Thiel wrote this op-ed in the New York Times, basically calling out Google for being too close to China and betraying America, basically all this kind of stuff. They called for them to be investigated by the FBI. Yeah. It's wild, right? And then like early 2020, Eric Schmidt releases his own op-ed where he's kind of like, no, like we are defending America. You know, we believe in the importance of America. And then he really begins this transformation where now he is one of the biggest pushers of like AI in the military has completely

adopted this narrative, like you see the bipartisanship, not just, you know, with Democrats and Republicans, but also how it's been adopted through so much of the tech industry. I'm glad you brought Schmidt up because I think that he is almost as central to all of this as Thiel. And crucial for this project, because as you point out, Eric Schmidt, as an ostensible liberal, is able to get buy-in from Democrats who might otherwise see the whole, we need 20 billion drones to defend Taiwan thing as just a, we might be more inclined to see it as a partisan project. But no, I mean, Eric Schmidt has been beating this drum for a long, long, long time. There's a wrinkle there with all the Project Maven stuff. I think that we should talk about that too. But yeah, no,

Schmidt is in the middle of this and has been, I mean, he wrote a book with Henry Kissinger. I mean, his ideology on this stuff is as hawkish as any Republican China hawk is, I think. Do you want to just briefly say what the Project Maven controversy was at Google and what that might have done to shift Schmidt's thinking and whatnot? Absolutely. So, I mean, that I think is like a seminal event over the past 10 or so years of how Silicon Valley's embrace or relationship with the Pentagon has changed. So Project Maven was an aborted Google project with the Department of Defense to provide basically machine learning, augmented drone technologies, targeting stuff. I mean, it never really got off the ground very much because when it was reported

that Google was going to work on drone warfare, there was a large employee revolt and there was internal outrage in addition to external press and public backlash to that. And the employee dissent was so acute that they actually got the company to ditch the project. They dropped that contract. And Google was put on the defensive. They had to sort of apologize to their employees and engage with this in a very real way. That is long gone, that dynamic. I mean, that feels almost unrecognizable now. I remember there were some internal emails from Google from, I'm blanking on the name, but from someone high up in their machine learning R&D, in the research arm. And some emails got published, I think,

believe the New York Times published them, where she's talking about how if people found out that Google was working with the military, that would be a major problem. Just even the fact of that would be a huge liability. That feels so quaint today when you have Mark Zuckerberg proudly talking about making augmented reality goggles for the army. I mean, Google is not shy about military contracting, whether it's here or in Israel, very notably. I guess my point is it's hard to imagine employee backlash getting those kinds of results today because the companies have lost their sense of whatever sense of shame or vulnerability they felt around this issue is gone. Yeah. And I feel like now when we do see

employees speaking up, interrupting keynotes and presentations and things like that, we often hear a day or two later about how they've been fired and basically just kicked out of the organization, whether it's at Microsoft or Google or wherever, you know, the kind of fear of the worker that maybe we had in that moment in the 2010s or so, when we started to see more of that worker organizing and advocacy at those companies, it really feels like that leverage is not there in the way that it was when they were trying to project a different image. Totally. Yeah. I mean, the worker-led opposition to military contracting continues at Google and Microsoft, but they've failed to get the companies in question to drop any of the contracts that they oppose, which I think that

it takes remarkable bravery to speak out and to put your neck on the line. And I think that the employee protest groups have brought a lot more scrutiny to bear on this part of the business than would have otherwise happened. But at the end of the day, the contracts are still going. And a big part of that, as you point out, is that these companies, you know, Google and Microsoft are not shy about just shit canning people who talk. They will not hesitate to fire you if you speak out. And, you know, there are quite a few engineers and other employees of these companies who are here on perhaps work-related visas. And given everything else that's happening in the country, if you are horrified by what your employer is doing and you speak out or you hold a sign outside the office or something and you get fired, I mean, they would have major

repercussions anyway in a country where you need your employer to have health insurance. But you're facing some pretty dire stuff. So I don't want to discount the really incredible bravery it takes to put yourself in that position. But what we've seen is companies just sort of not caring. They are okay being branded as being in the business of war and in the business, you know, at least adjacent to the business of killing. The stigma around that has vanished. Yeah. No, which I think is really well said, right? It takes a lot of bravery to continue doing this in an environment where the companies have become so much more hostile to any kind of worker advocacy. I wanted to pick up on a couple more aspects of this kind of narrative that these companies are putting out there. When I read what, say, Alex Karp is writing and these Palantir folks, they're basically making this argument that Silicon Valley became too focused on consumer American power and to protect the place of the United States in this current more, I don't know, geopolitically fractious world, I guess. And then the other piece of that is, of course, often pointing to SpaceX as the example,

right, to justify what they want to do. They say, look how SpaceX moved into rocketry and brought down the cost and made things more efficient. Now we want to do that with drones and targeting and guns and tanks and planes and like whatever else, right? If you listen to Palmer Luckey and these folks as well. I guess, what do you make of this broader image they are trying to project in order to serve this project that we've been talking about them trying to implement here? This is another area where this goes nowhere without China. You need the specter. I mean, it only makes sense to say, stop making products for consumers and start making weapons if you're able to convince people that the world is as dangerous as you're saying it is,

right? Like a world that needs constant armament and rearmament and developing of state-of-the-art weapons at all times is only a coherent vision of the world where there is a communist plot for global domination coming from China. It's obviously a little self-serving to say, hey, we make defense and intelligence tools and we think that the defense and intelligence sector should be bigger. I think also that there's a part of that that goes back to sort of the cultural, the office. I mean, I don't want to say it's not it's bigger than office politics, but the sort of corporate dissent issue that we get into with Project Maven stuff. They very much want to normalize people wanting to work for weapons makers. So I think when they talk about, oh, these companies are too consumer-oriented, Palantir and Anduril and Shield AI and all these companies and venture firms want engineers to graduate from Stanford or Carnegie Mellon or wherever and be eager to help build lethal drones or missiles or whatever it may be. So you have to kind of prime the pump.

And I really think that the cultural shift around this stuff is as significant as anything else. You need engineers to be willing to do this stuff. And I think that that is a big utility of a document like that, like the Palantir, the Reformation thing. God, they, they really look, they really do fancy themselves as like philosopher philosopher warriors of like an ancient Greek variety or something. That clearly comes from like teal and carp, right? They're both. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, exactly. Exactly.

So I think that the exhortation to pivot from consumer to military and intelligence also is working. You the past year, Google has formally dropped some of its harm-based prohibitions around AI development that allow for more military work. Meta has dropped its prohibition against military AI and has formally become a defense contractor by partnering with Anduril. OpenAI dropped its prohibition against military and intelligence work and immediately jumped into that world. So you have seen an actual shift away from being a purely consumer or enterprise business to the business of warfare. I mean, 20 years ago, when I first got my Gmail account, it would have been unfathomable that Google would be a major defense contractor. When I first installed Windows XP when I was a teenager,

it would have been strange to think about Microsoft being as gargantuan a military contractor around the world as they are. And Facebook is one of the crazier ones. For Meta to embrace military contracting is just so strange given how that company got started. But all these companies got started building software for people to use at home and at work. I think the truth is that you can only sell so many Instagram ads. You can only get people to buy so many Meta AI Ray-Bans or whatever. You can only sell so many Google Cloud accounts to small businesses. There is a shitload of money if you can get that Pentagon spigot to open.

And this gets back to the question of like, do these people really believe these things about the world? Or do they recognize accurately that military defense contracting is super, super, super lucrative and you can make a ton of money that way. I think it depends, but either, you know, even, even the true believers have to recognize that they stand to profit immensely through this worldview. Yeah. And this industry does seem really good at convincing themselves of their own bullshit, right? To make it seem like it's not just a business proposition or something, but that they're saving the world or whatever by doing whatever it is that they're doing. I want to ask you a bit more about open AI, but I have one more question before that, which is really around this more aggressive rhetoric. You mentioned how Alex

Karp will be on these investor calls and we'll be talking about war and killing and all this sort of stuff. And I listened to this interview with Palmer Luckey recently. He's been talking about how we need a warrior class that's ready to sacrifice and go to war and all this kind of stuff. And it's basically positioning his vision of what the future is going to look like as one that is very much deterrence-based by having all of these Western allies of the United States becoming like porcupines because they're armed to the teeth with a bunch of AI and automated weapons and all this kind of stuff. I just wonder what you make of the language that these people use and how easily they talk about death and war and these sorts of things. So I just pulled up this quote. This was from February of this year,

and this is from Alex Karp. Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and when it's necessary to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. That is, I think, an unusual way for a chief executive of a company to talk. I mean, you don't hear even the CEOs of companies that are very directly in the business of slaughter, right? Like you don't speak that way, but it's a branding thing. It's like a, you know, hyper masculine, unapologetically violent, right-wing political and business project. You know, again, I mentioned the constant reference to the CCP and the PRC as being sort of like wink, wink, anti-communist. I mean, obviously, it is the CCP and it is the PRC. But I think when you're saying CCP instead

of China, you are sending a signal of sorts. It is, again, like a political wink and nod. Constant invocations of Chinese communism and of the Communist Party. And also, I think the term national security is fascinating, especially when in the mouths of these executives, particularly someone like Mark Zuckerberg. Meta has billions of users around the world. Most of them, the overwhelming majority of them are not Americans. And so to have a company like Meta, an American company, obviously, but one with a global presence and one that has the ability to police the speech of billions of non-Americans. When you have that company saying we are in the business of American national security, there's an antagonism there, right? Like most people who are using Meta products, their security is not our national security. I'm saying that as an American.

I mean, that is not their interest. They might live in countries that are allied with the United States. They very well may live in countries that are considered adversaries of the United States. And so I think that is a really important dynamic to keep an eye on is companies with global user bases that are vast, that are throwing in with one particular country. And, you know, it's not strange for an American company that's headquartered in California to say, hey, we believe in America and we support the United States, et cetera. But they it's it goes beyond that. You know, it goes beyond that and into we want to advance American security interests, you know, foreign policy goals and maintain American dominance of, you know, of the planet.

That is, I think, a very different message than just, yes, obviously, you know, we we love our country. You know, you are aligning your technology company with the State Department and the Pentagon. And that's profound. Yeah. I remember even when Frances Haugen leaked all that stuff a few years ago, and she was in front of, I can't remember if it was the Senate or the House, one of those committees. And obviously, everyone was talking about the Instagram revelations and the bigger problems. But I remember one of the Congress people there was basically asking her about the way that Meta or Facebook was working with the intelligence departments and whether they should be doing more of that. And, you know,

despite all the criticism of Facebook, she kind of laid out how they were working with the intelligence agencies in the United States to identify Chinese use of the platform, Iranian use of the platform, things like that, and said that, you know, they should be doing more of it, right? So like, to a certain degree degree some of these things have already been happening but we're seeing a lot more of it come much more out in the open in a way like you were talking about in the past where these companies would want to kind of hide the fact that they were working with the u.s government with intelligence agencies with the defense department now it's like we are going to put that out there right on the forefront we might even exaggerate a bit what we're actually doing and the impact that it's going

to have because things have shifted so much in the past few years. Well, there's also, yeah, absolutely. But there's also a great irony, I think, of one of these specific threats that we are warned about vis-a-vis China by many of these same companies and executives is the extent to which Chinese companies work hand in glove with the Chinese military and with Chinese military intelligence. There's always the invocation of civil military fusion, right? Like the Chinese private sector is a mirage.

It's all just one big machine. And for those reasons, we need tighter integration than ever between the Department of Defense and Silicon Valley. It doesn't seem like they ever recognize an issue there. And it's funny to imagine what the rest of the world is supposed to make of that. You're basically saying when Chinese corporations collaborate directly with the Chinese military, that is cause for massive alarm. But when American companies do the very same thing, you know, that should be reassuring. You know, again, I think that whether or not you believe that depends very much on where you live in this large world, you know, and if you were one of the

non-American users of these, I mean, I'm talking about the big tech platforms, not about something like Palantir and Andruil, but if you are a meta user or a Google user, odds are you probably have a very different view of American hegemony. I feel like even a few years ago, even a lot of Western allies would have been broadly okay with that. But these days, that is really changing. Even if you're in Canada, you probably aren't. That hits different now. Making American military hegemony a business priority, I think, has incredible implications. But, you know, that's a huge part of the pitch. You know, I think that also getting back to the, you know, patriotism versus cynicism question here.

I think that it is very savvy from a business perspective. If you were perhaps worried about, oh, I don't know, antitrust scrutiny or regulatory scrutiny from Congress. I mean, not that there's a huge threat of that right now, but if you're one of these companies, you see getting with the team as being sort of insulating yourself from some of that. I think it stands to reason that you are much less likely to get dragged before Congress and yelled at again if you are proudly declaring that American national security is a core meta value. Absolutely. And I feel like on that point, maybe that's a good opportunity to talk briefly about OpenAI, right? Because this is not a company, you know, it's been around for a little while, but it's not one of these dominant firms like a like aa or a Google, but it has risen really quickly in the past few years. And it certainly had a very different narrative in its earlier days when it founded as a non-profit

versus now being a very dominant and influential company within Silicon Valley. How have you seen the narrative that that company is using shift over the past few years, given its own business interests, but also the larger changing political climate that has been happening at the same time. Yeah. So, I mean, OpenAI is a fascinating case study because 10 years ago, it was founded as a explicitly globalist humanitarian non-profit. The mission was, and still is at least on their website, to ensure that AI benefits all of humanity. And that term, that phrase, benefits all of humanity, is key and is like the cornerstone of the company's ethos, at least it says. And so a lot of the early rhetoric out of OpenAI

is about this explicitly international mission. AI is going to benefit the species that created it, not the country where OpenAI is headquartered. Ten years later, that is long gone, at least in terms of public messaging and in terms of internal hiring. But OpenAI, rewind a little bit, they, up until very recently, have an explicit prohibition against military work in their acceptable use policy. You cannot use chat GPT to augment your military operations. They delete that. At around the same time that that happens, they are continuing to staff up with alumni from the Department of Defense, from the intelligence community, and they start hiring

with a lot of explicitly national security-oriented goals. Now, I have a piece coming out in The Intercept this week about the question of how is it possible to have a mission that seeks to benefit the entire species, the entire world, everyone on the planet. And then also say, we believe in securing the future of the United States on a global scale. We believe in ensuring American artificial intelligence dominance. We believe in supporting American national security. We support the American military and intelligence community. They have made national security as a concept their byword. That is informing the mission right now. And the thing about national security is that it's specific to one country, right?

Like national security, when you're an American, you're talking about national security. You're talking about American national security. You're talking about American military and foreign policy interests. And I think it is worth questioning to what extent it is possible to reconcile a mission of benefiting all of humanity and a mission of benefiting the military of one individual country. I would suggest that it is not possible to reconcile. Those two things are irreconcilable. You have to sort of choose whether you're, you know, team world or team America. It makes me think that the United States has often tried to thread that line a number of times. What immediately comes to mind is the moon landing. And, you know, this is something that is for all of mankind, you know,

at the moment would have been what they were saying, but then you plant the American flag and it's about showing American dominance and that America was able to do this, and specifically not the Soviet Union, right? Absolutely. And, you know, it's funny, there are so many echoes of, you know, so many things that are coming out of OpenAI, you know, and from Sam Altman individually, but also just from the company in terms of its public rhetoric, sounds exactly like something that would have come out of the State Department. They talk about basically how, in some cases, OpenAI's business interests and American national security interests are one in the same, right? And again, it comes back to China. OpenAI is very keen to outpace Chinese competitors,

and they argue that the corporate AI race and the great power competition between the US and China are one in the same. They're the same battle. And so it doesn't make sense for us to sort of dispense with all the formalities and team up. And team up they have. Again, they have really rushed to embrace defense intelligence contracting. Yeah. And I guess on that point, like my final question would really be, we're seeing these alignments happening. We're obviously seeing the American government shift toward this relationship with the tech industry and the tech industry really trying to take advantage of this in order to ensure that they have much more access to all of this funding from the Pentagon, from the Defense Department, are being prioritized for procurement more and more.

But what do you see as the potential consequence of all of this and the risks that this is setting up as we have the tech industry basically explicitly becoming defense contractors, seeing that as a primary revenue source for them. And, you know, the language that you were talking about where they are using this kind of militaristic, warlike, aggressive language, what are your concerns about all of those developments? There are many. Well, first, there's just a colossal potential for fraud and corruption here. And, you know, I want to say to say, I think that these companies really, the defense tech companies really want to be viewed as a sea change and a total break from

the prior history of American military contracting. Maybe in some ways they are significantly different, but I think it would be a big mistake to look at them as somehow like a paradigm shift or like this is a whole new world. No, they're going to be subject to all the same problems as arms makers have always been subject to, which is revolving door between government and private industry and all of the collusion that and corruption that can come with that. The massive conflicts of interest, you know, the advancing of defense spending programs that provide little benefit or utility, but are very lucrative. I mean, the goggles that Meta is building with Andrel, I think are a great example. It was originally a Microsoft project and they were being tested in the field. They were causing incredible bouts of nausea among soldiers who were wearing them. Like they didn't work. They made people feel sick and it was super expensive, you know? So I think that, you know, we need to look for all the same red flags that we've always, you know, people

have always looked for is like, does this make sense? All these tech guys love to, you know, love to slag on the F-35, but it's like, to what extent are they just building an F-35 out of drones now? It's AI now, right? The potential for bullshit is significant the name of American foreign policy is a good thing is a virtue. Having those people be in positions of greater influence is obviously alarming, particularly if you're not an American. But even if you are, I mean, these are people who for whom war or at least the specter of war, are fantastic for business, and they are very visible. I doubt anyone could name who the hell the CEO of Raytheon is or Lockheed, but the people who run these companies are, if not household names, they're at weight around and to throw their influence around. And there are people who want, if not a war with China, to get as close as possible, because that's how you sell fleets of drones and next generation machine learning platforms, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So to have people for whom war is excellent business be in a position of political influence is I think, you know, it's obvious why that's dangerous. I mean, that is excellent business. Being in a position of political influence is, I think, it's obvious why that's dangerous.

I mean, that is literally dangerous. The fraud, waste, and abuse stuff is awful and corrosive to a society. But the Ray Ra, let's go to war, we need to stockpile bombs and drones, etc., is, I think, dangerous know, interested in far more literal sense. You know, when you're thinking about those projects that are supposed to be much more efficient and much better, but actually turn out to be boondoggles, we might be in the process of seeing that with the Starship rocket, even after SpaceX did so much better with the Falcon 9 and things like that. Right. So just because they say they're better doesn't mean they necessarily are. And I wish something that people kept in mind more often with SpaceX and the Starship rocket specifically is like that even, you know, I think SpaceX somehow gets a pass as being like a we're going to build Starfleet.

We're bringing the species to Mars or whatever. No, I mean, SpaceX is obviously a colossal defense contractor. And the Starship, the Starship rocket specifically has been assessed within the Department of Defense as a potential cargo hauler or even troop carrier. So, like, this is a military platform as well. They've gotten away somehow with being like a space six doesn't have the same connotation as Palantir or, you know, Andoril even. Yeah, because it's just making us multi-planetary, right? But maybe that changes now that Elon Musk's reputation is sullied by the Doge work.

We'll see. Anyway, Sam, it was really great to have you on the show to explore all of the scary realities of what's happening with this tech Trump collaboration. Thanks so much for taking the time. Fantastic to be here. Thanks for having me on. Sam Biddle is a senior technology reporter

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