SpaceX, Palantir, and OpenAI Reportedly Teaming Up to Score Some Sweet, Sweet Defense Contractor Cash

New Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse conscionable dropped: According to the Financial Times, large defence exertion companies Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril are successful conversations with SpaceX and OpenAI (among different tech players) to signifier a consortium to bid for US authorities defence contracts.

The extremity of the group, which reportedly plans to denote its rank arsenic soon arsenic January, is to disrupt the “prime” contractors who person a wont of scoring large deals with the Pentagon. In the crosshairs of the consortium, there’s Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing.

There is small question that the bequest brands bash good bidding connected defence work. According to the Department of Defense’s Fiscal Year 2023 review, Lockheed Martin took location $61.4 billion, RTX (née Raytheon) scored $24.1 billion, and Boeing got a chill $20.1 billion. In 2021, 71% of each of Lockheed Martin’s revenue came from contracts with the US government. Just nether 50% of each yearly income for Boeing and RTX went to the feds during the aforesaid clip period. As The American Prospect has antecedently pointed out, these are basically state-funded companies but the authorities has nary existent power implicit operations oregon leadership.

So would the information and information of the state amended by disrupting the large three’s vice grip connected the Pentagon? Probably, nether the presumption that mass-producing weapons of warfare and supplying them to allies for conflicts that scope from mostly conscionable to genocidal is simply a nett affirmative connected nationalist security, which, let’s telephone that dubious.

But this peculiar postulation of tech firms arsenic the hammer to bash the oligopoly? It’s not wide that this is an betterment upon the presumption quo.

Palantir has carved itself retired a niche arsenic the Defense Department’s go-to for AI systems. Just this year, it snagged a $100 cardinal contract to physique the subject AI-powered targeting tools and $480 million to grow the Pentagon’s information investigation and determination making tools. The institution has been much than blessed to lend its tech to programs that are astatine champion ethically questionable, including being the technological backbone of the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, helping pb to the breakup of migrant families and facilitating wide raids that led to the separation of children and parents. The company’s technology has besides been cardinal to Israel’s ongoing seige successful Gaza that has killed implicit 45,000 people.

Anduril, called “tech’s astir arguable startup” by Bloomberg, has built sensor towers for usage connected the US-Mexico borderline to way migrants and has explored the improvement of autonomous weapons. The company’s large play is building drones for warfare, but it besides has its eyes on gathering surveillance satellites, each of which transportation immoderate superior ethical questions attached.

OpenAI precocious announced a concern with Anduril to enactment connected anti-drone systems, but it seems apt that volition beryllium the archetypal of galore collaborations if the consortium comes together. The agreement, which has caused immoderate upheaval among OpenAI employees who don’t peculiarly privation to beryllium progressive successful doing defence work, comes aft OpenAI softly removed connection from its usage policy restricting the usage of its exertion for subject and warfare purposes.

And connected apical of each that, It’s Peter Thiel each the mode down, baby. Thiel, the techno-libertarian lizard antheral who has not-so-quietly been trying to spot his acolytes successful arsenic galore branches of authorities arsenic possible, has his hands successful fundamentally each of these firms. He founded Palantir, co-founded OpenAI, enactment large fiscal backing down Anduril, and was an early-stage capitalist successful SpaceX. He’s proven himself to beryllium a less-than-scrupulous idiosyncratic with an ideology that tin far-too-generously beryllium summed up arsenic “technological advancement nary substance the quality cost.” Thiel’s biographer, Max Chafkin, told Time that Thiel is worthy fearing, stating, “When you harvester the hostility to ideology and organization norms with the bankroll of a billionaire you tin perchance bash immoderate damage.”

Suddenly, possibly the malignant but presumption quo evil of the aged schoolhouse defence contractors doesn’t look rather arsenic bad.