OpenAI, ChatGPT, Google’s continual Gemini faceplants, and now Apple’s (“Intelligence”) tend to dominate the public conversation about AI. But what about militarized AI, the AI of global warfare, the AI that will theoretically control the killer robots of sci-fi lore? Let us not forget what fully 1/6th of the entire federal budget, and fully half (50%) of the annual discretionary budget is allocated towards: national defense, aka military operations and equipment. What portion then, to militarized AI?
The purpose of this post is to face forward just a few of the private corporations defining the new battlefront: the “cyber” front, aka cyberwarfare. Whereas the 20th century was dominated by the likes of Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, and GE (yes, that same company that made all your light bulbs), the 21st has a new class of faster, more nimble defense contractors. These include SpaceX, Starlink, Palantir, and Anduril. (yes, two of them are named after Lord of the Rings artifacts… who wrote this movie script?)
| SpaceX | Palantir | Anduril | |
| CEO | Elon Musk | Alex Karp | Palmer Luckey |
| founded | 2002 | 2003 | 2017 |
| employees | 13,000 | 4,000 | 2,500 |
| HQ | Hawthorne, CA (Los Angeles) |
Palo Alto, CA (Silicon Valley) |
Irvine, CA (Orange County) |
| annual revenue | $9B | $2B | $0.5B |
| investment | $10B | $3B | $4B |
| valuation | $150B | $72B | $14B |
| what they do | dominates global space launch market / Starlink dominates global satellite data / communications market | deep data analytics / surveillance / spy systems / AI intelligence / counter-terrorism | skynet: building the killer robot army, its command and control system, & the AI operating system powering it all |
As 2/3 of these remain privately held companies (Palantir started trading as NYSE:PLTR in 2020), the personalities of their founders / CEOs tend to play an oversized role in their character and decision making. Here’s a quick summary of the new players, the forces who are building the militarized AI battlebots of our future:
1. SpaceX / Elon Musk
SpaceX : launching weapons into space
SpaceX controls the orbital launch market… read : both spy satellites, and militarized AI space weaponry (yes, Star Wars finally came to be true. Even as we speak, there are satellites with all sorts of weapons in space, hunting and seeking, acquiring and stalking targets, ready to destroy the enemy at the push of a button). SpaceX accounts for fully 54% of space launches in the world today (and an insane 94% of U.S. launches… total domination), and their primary customer is… the US Space Force.
That’s one side of the Musk / Militarized AI equation. And then there’s the backbone of global military ops: secure, reliable voice communication and high-speed data transmission, even deep within enemy territory, far outside of reasonable cellular coverage. This is where company two, in fact a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX, comes into play:
Starlink : controlling global military communications
Starlink is the wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX that has a present-day hegemony over secure, global, off-grid satellite communication and data transmission. They presently have almost 10,000 (ten thousand!) satellites in LEO (Low Earth Orbit), with plans to add another 50,000 in the next 5 years. Caveat: “secure” might depend on who you are, and what Mr. Musk thinks of your motives.
Musk famously made the unilateral decision in September 2022 to shut down portions of the StarLink network that would have allowed Ukraine to launch drone attacks across the border into Russia. The US Military brass, global heads of state… even the United Nations, were aghast. Was this is private company CEO, flexing his muscle into global geopolitics and nation-state warfare, without even bothering to consult government?!? How was this possible?
Three words made it possible: the Commercialization of Space.
As soon as NASA and the ESA started contracting to a private company (SpaceX), the balance of power shifted. Ands now Musk was flexing that power… massively.
This was only the first incident. Watch across the years as thay power struggle (government / military vs. ultra-wealthy private citizens) continues to evolve…
2. Palantir / Alex Karp
This might be the entity building militarized AI with the least visible public front. It also may be, in the end, the most powerful of the three. Palantir makes a practice of analyzing every bit of data it can get its hands on (and with national security clearances which over-ride citizen privacy laws, that is quite a lot) — from call records, to email contents, to social media activity, to credit card purchases, to air / hotel / toll booth travel records, to highway license plate cameras — and trying to find the patterns in that data that lead to “tangible national security threats.”
“Saving lives and on occasion taking lives is super interesting,” Mr. Karp told me.
He described what his company does as “the finding of hidden things” — sifting through mountains of data to perceive patterns, including patterns of suspicious or aberrant behavior.
…
Karp thinks the United States is “very likely” to end up in a three-front war with China, Russia and Iran. So, he argues, we have to keep going full-tilt on autonomous weapons systems, because our adversaries will — and they don’t have the same moral considerations that we do.
Mr. Karp said that we are “very close” to terminator robots and at the threshold of “somewhat autonomous drones and devices like this being the most important instruments of war. You already see this in Ukraine.”
excerpted from the New York Times profile : Alex Karp (Aug 2024):
“Alex Karp Has Money and Power. So What Does He [Really] Want?”
Palantir’s key customers are, essentially, what is known inside the beltway as “the Intelligence Community”… essentially, all those spooky agencies with three-letter acronyms: the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the DHS. And yes, even ICE, and of course the Pentagon (DoD).
Palantir is essentially the database / AI backbone of present-day national defense strategy. The militarized AI that it develops is not hardware, but pure software. In fact, some might even see it (next to people and personalities) as the very foundation of our national defense. Let that sink in.
3. Anduril / Palmer Luckey
If Luckey’s name sounds familiar to you, that’s because it should be. As a young Orange County wunderkind, he is largely credited with creating the company and the hardware (Oculus) which ushered in the modern age of VR — Virtual Reality. If you find your friends, family, or children colliding with living room furniture while wearing a set of bizarre goggles on their head, Palmer is the man to blame.
Oculus did pretty damn well on its own, with none other than John Carmack lending support quite early on, but it was the $2 billion acquisition of Oculus by Mark Zuckerberg in 2016 the truly force-launched VR into orbit. Since then, Zuck has not backed down, changing his company name to Meta(verse), and investing more than $30 billion to date to make VR as ubiquitous as the TV or the smartphone. He has yet to succeed in this mission.
>> Read my summary of what the world has gotten in terms of VR advancement, 2014-2024.
Anyways… Palmer, as a young man, was the poster child for VR, even making a (horrible) cover of Wired Magazine in 2014, and a (worse?) cover of Time Magazine barely a year later. However, the man had (what can we say) some fairly radicalized political views, and was not shy about speaking his mind to anyone who would listen. This did not sit well with the hyper-conservative and politically embattled management of Facebook, and Palmer left the company under muddled circumstances.
To his (character) credit, the kid doubled down. He announced the formation of Anduril, which would create “the VR command and control systems for global fleets of AI-powered drones, on air, land, and sea.” Translation: you got it. SkyNet.
People were aghast. People laughed. Including entrenched old school defense contractors. But Palmer didn’t care. He kept raising money, he kept building, he kept talking shit, he kept dreaming about militarized AI, and he kept acquiring every AI-drone (aka killer robot) startup that he could get his hands on.
And here we are today. Anduril has raised $4 billion in VC funding, has acquired 5 companies, has a current valuation north of $14 billion, and is seen as a key defense contractor in the brave new world of AI cyberwarfare and fully autonomous drone battles. Technically, these are known as Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems LAWS.
So, you want to see what embodiments of this artificial intelligence arms race actually look like? Witness key components of the present-day Anduril AI Arsenal:
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prompt: “two robot armies engaged in full close range melee with laser beams and explosions”
engine: MidJourney 6.1