Written by: Alex M. on 7 September 2026
Above: Lt. Gen. Michael Groen, Joint Artificial Intelligence Center director, conducts a press briefing about the DOD's efforts to adopt and scale artificial intelligence capabilities, from the Pentagon, Arlington, VA, Nov. 24, 2020. (DoD photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Jack Sanders) Public Domain
A cornerstone of U.S. imperialism since the end of World War Two is the military-industrial complex, also known as the military-industrial-Congressional complex, which highlights the symbiotic relationship that the U.S. political system has with the war machine. The military budgets voted by U.S. Congresses are truly staggering, with the ‘Big Five’ military contractors – Lockheed Martin, Raytheon (now RTX), Boeing, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman divvying up $US 2.1 trillion between them in the twenty- year period from11/9/2001 to 2021. The Pentagon budget for the 2025 fiscal year was $US 895 billion, with the expectation that the next Pentagon budget will top $US 1 trillion. (1)
Palantir
It is no wonder then that the Tech bros have coveted a slice of this monstrous pie. Tech bros such as Peter Thiel and Alex Karp of Palantir have made no apologies about their pursuit of government contracts, seeing this as both patriotic and lucrative. Thiel made his first fortune with Paypal and then using the fraud detection algorithm from Paypal, Thiel set up Palantir. (2) Palantir came into being in 2003 with early funding coming from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm. (3) Since 2003, Palantir has established itself as the data analytics corporation, not only in the U.S. but increasingly throughout the western world. According to William Hartung and Ben Freeman, Palantir’s connection with the U.S. military runs deep:
Palantir’s bread and butter is the supply of advanced computing and data-management systems that have been used to help the Army share data across the service, from bases in the United States to commanders on the battlefield. Palantir also does research for the Army on future uses of AI and on targeting … (4)
As Hartung and Freeman point out this is not all that Palantir does; the company is notorious for
providing systems that have enabled harsh border crackdowns by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as well as enabling ‘predictive policing,’ which involves the collection of vast amounts of personal data without a warrant, relying on algorithms with built-in racial biases that have led to the systematic, unfair targeting and treatment of people of color. (5)
Types like Thiel and Palantir’s CEO Alex Karp embrace Palantir’s notoriety and their military and Pentagon connections as well as their involvement with the Israeli state. Karp has claimed that companies like his, which were providing military systems to Israel to enable its campaign of slaughter and war crimes in Gaza, were the “the true peace activists” that advocates of a ceasefire “are war activists.”’ (6)
Thiel has also supported and mentored some up and coming military technology boffins. A prime example being Palmer Luckey, the young billionaire founder of Anduril. Luckey was 22 when he sold the rights to a virtual-reality headset that he developed to Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta for $US 2 billion in 2014. Since then Luckey has been involved in various pursuits such as gaming, but is more well known for founding the military technology company Anduril. Anduril’s products include ‘airborne and underwater drones, as well as advanced communications and surveillance systems.’ (7) One of the key products that Anduril has produced is Lattice which gathers information from all available sources, fuses the data and puts it in the hands of military commanders in the field in very quick time. (8) Lattice was also pressed into service by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency using it to track people trying to cross the U.S. border from Mexico. (9)
Project Maven
The Pentagon initiated a project of integrating data analytics into the military on a grand scale in 2017 with the implementation of Project Maven. The sheer volume of data that floods into the U.S. military on a daily basis overwhelmed the capacity of military personnel to efficiently deal with it. Hence the drive to automate the process of data mining. One of the first of the Big Tech corporations associated with Project Maven was Google. However, in 2018 Google faced a revolt from its scientists and engineers 4,000 of whom had signed an open letter addressed to Google management, demanding that Google not be involved in the business of war. (10) The revolt was partially successful, with Google stepping away from work on Project Maven, but not completely relinquishing its ties with the Department of Defense (DoD):
In March 2019, … an email written by Google’s vice president for Global affairs, Kent Walker, … indicated that a third-party company would continue working on Project Maven using ‘off-the-shelf Google Cloud Platform (basic compute service, rather than Cloud AI or other Cloud Services) to support some workloads.’ Walker added that Google was working with ‘DoD to make the transition in a way that is consistent with our AI principles and contractual commitments.’ Several days later, reports revealed that the Defense Department has awarded the Project Maven contract to Anduril… (11)
Since 2018, Anduril has been joined by other tech companies such as Anthropic and Palantir in providing services for Project Maven. Palantir’s involvement with the project started in 2019. What Palantir did was to supply Maven with a sophisticated mapping tool called Gaia and then provided its Foundry software, which became Maven’s operating system. By 2022, when Russia invaded the Ukraine, ‘Maven had … dramatically improved the military’s situational awareness in combat zones … accelerating the so-called kill chain, the time between the identification of a target and its destruction or liquidation.’ (12)
Maven has been integral in U.S. support for Ukraine providing real time information to the Ukrainian military about Russian troop movements, by amassing and analysing huge quantities of drone and satellite imagery. Maven however, remains firmly in U.S. control, with the intelligence gathering operation run out of a secret location in Germany led by Lieutenant General Christopher Donahue of the Army’s 18th Airborne Corps. (13) Not only drone and satellite imagery has been gathered up and analysed; data from mobile phones is an important resource as well:
… via Foundry, Maven was able to deliver much more than just an exquisitely detailed view of the battlefield. Palantir’s technology also enabled Donahue’s team to pull in cellular data. As it happened, many Russian soldiers – including, it turned out commanding officers – were using their personal cell phones to communicate because their military-issued phones didn’t work. This allowed the Americans to identify their precise locations, information then shared with the Ukrainians. (14)
Never one for modesty, Karp bragged that Palantir was behind the Ukrainian successes against the invading Russian forces in the early stages of the war. The Pentagon was embarrassed by Karp’s bragging as it highlighted U.S. involvement in what is a proxy war between rival imperialist powers. (15)
Project Nimbus
Another major Pentagon and Silicon Valley project run in conjunction with the Israeli state is Project Nimbus. Nimbus is a $US 1.2 billion contract to provide cloud computing, AI, and other services to the Israeli government and military.
Both Google and Amazon signed up to Nimbus in 2021 with staff at both Tech corporations expressing concern about Google and Amazon’s participation in the project. A number of Google staff quit in protest in 2022, with Jewish employee Ariel Koren citing Google’s silencing of ‘Palestinian, Jewish, Arab and Muslim voices concerned about Google’s complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights …’ in her letter of resignation. (16)
As Loewenstein reveals, Nimbus’s contractual obligations effectively ensures that Israel and its military is not denied access to advanced AI and cloud computing services it has contracted with U.S. big Tech corporations in the event of mass boycott pressure. (17) Project Nimbus is a guarantee that the Zionist state gets what it wants from Silicon Valley and Silicon Valley for the most part is happy to oblige.
To conclude, what the above shows is just the tip of the iceberg with a few of the most egregious examples of Big Tech involvement with the Pentagon, the DoD, the Israeli and Ukrainian states and militaries. It is apparent that U.S. imperialism is well served by Silicon Valley.
In Part Three, Australia’s supine relationship with U.S. Big Tech will be examined.
1. William D. Hartung and Ben Freeman, The Trillion Dollar War Machine: How Runaway Military Spending Drives America into Foreign Wars and Bankrupts Us At Home, Bold Type Books, New York, 2025, p. 3.
2. Yasha Levine, Surveillance Valley; The Secret Military History of the Internet, Icon Books, London, 2019, p. 180.
3. Hartung and Freeman, The Trillion Dollar War Machine…, p. 243
4. Ibid, p. 243
5. Ibid, p. 243
6. Ibid, p. 240
7. Ibid, p. 241
8. Ibid, p. 241
9. Roberto J Gonzalez, War Virtually The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future, University of California Press, 2024, p. 66
10. Hartung and Freeman, p. 263.
11. Gonzalez, War Virtually…, p. 65
12. Michael Steinberger, The Philosopher in the Valley Alex Karp, Palantir and the Rise of the Surveillance State, Simon and Schuster, London, 2025, p. 218
13. Steinberger, The Philosopher…, p. 218
14. Ibid, p. 219
15. Ibid, pp. 219-220. At the Pentagon’s behest, Karp toned the bragging down.
16. Antony Loewenstein, The Palestine Laboratory How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World, Scribe, Melbourne, 2024, p. 188
17. Ibid, p. 188
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