TECH
Takeover by Big Tech
In late July 2025, deep within the Pentagon’s bureaucratic machinery, the US Army quietly signed away a critical piece of its sovereignty. A $10bn contract with Palantir Technologies – one of the largest in the Department of Defense’s history – consolidated 75 separate procurement agreements into a single package. What looked like bureaucratic streamlining was in reality a strategic handover of core military functions to a private company whose founder, Peter Thiel, has openly declared that freedom and democracy are no longer compatible
This handover means that targeting decisions, troop movements and intelligence analysis increasingly flow through algorithms governed not by military command but by a corporate board answerable to shareholders. The army wasn’t just buying software, it was ceding operational sovereignty to a platform it can no longer function without.
Beyond Palantir, under the banner of ‘patriotic tech’, a coalition of firms, funders and ideologues is engineering a planetary infrastructure for techno-political control. It’s a stacked system – cloud platforms, AI models, financial rails, drone networks, orbital systems – forming what I call the ‘Authoritarian Stack’. Where traditional authoritarianism relies on mass mobilisation and state violence, this system operates through technological infrastructure and financial coordination, making classic resistance appear not just difficult but obsolete. At its helm stand Silicon Valley’s most rightwing figures – Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Palmer Luckey and Alexander Karp – whose investments align with a political project: the remaking of sovereignty as a private asset class.
The critical infrastructures of the state are being replaced and reinstalled across five strategic domains: personal information, money supply, defence, orbital communication and energy – the very foundations of democratic control.
It starts with control of the operating system. The $10bn US army consolidation confirmed what insiders already knew: Palantir – in which Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, reportedly holds up to $250,000 of stock – has become the de facto operating system of the US government. It’s the universal data platform underpinning battlefield management, supply chain logistics, personnel systems and intelligence analysis. The Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) employs Palantir’s Foundry platform – originally developed for counterinsurgency in Iraq – to automate federal budgeting, welfare eligibility, healthcare reimbursements and veterans’ benefits using algorithmic processes that encode political choices deeply. Another of Palantir’s tools, ImmigrationOS, helps ICE (the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) to locate undocumented foreigners and manage the flow of arrests and deportations.
Palantir is the data backbone of the authoritarian state, and Anduril is its autonomous warfare command system, turning information dominance into automated military power. Co-founded by Palmer Luckey (creator of Oculus) and Trae Stephens (a partner at Founders Fund and former Palantir executive), it holds more than $22bn in defence contracts. Its $30.5bn valuation reflects not only commercial success but also growing control over core military infrastructure.
Its Lattice platform connects satellite feeds, radar data and battlefield imagery into a single operational network, allowing military missions to be planned and executed at lightning speed. The company claims its systems can function at ‘level 5 autonomy’: launching, identifying targets, striking and returning without human intervention. ‘Autonomy’ is also the keyword of the Unleashing US Military Drone Dominance initiative announced by defence secretary Pete Hegseth this July; this aims for full integration of autonomous weapons systems by 2027.
Starshield, SpaceX’s classified military constellation, represents the privatisation of low orbit communication, once an exclusively state domain. Though promoted as ‘sovereign infrastructure’, it is in fact owned and controlled by Elon Musk’s private company. When NATO’s battlefield communications depend on infrastructure controlled by one man who openly endorses European far-right parties, defence autonomy becomes theatrical fiction. Pentagon officials are exploring the possibility of using the reusable mega-rocket Starship as a logistics platform for moving troops and material anywhere on Earth in under an hour.
Other solutions such as GovCloud, from Amazon Web Services, or Azure Government, provided by Microsoft – in partnership with OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic – are now embedded in classified military and intelligence operations. The ‘sovereignty’ these platforms promise actually means being insulated from public scrutiny and increasingly binding governments to private corporate infrastructures.
To understand why this capture is happening so rapidly, follow the personnel. The revolving door no longer spins between government and industry – it locks them together in a new architecture of power.
JD Vance, now vice-president, rose to power after Peter Thiel poured $15m into his 2022 campaign for election as US senator for Ohio – the largest single donation to an individual Senate race in American history. Michael Kratsios, Thiel’s former chief of staff, now heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Michael Obadal, an Anduril executive, still held up to $1m in Anduril stock when he was confirmed by the Senate as army under-secretary (the second-highest civilian position at the Pentagon) in September.
Gregory Barbaccia, after a decade at Palantir’s intelligence division, now serves as the federal government’s chief information officer, overseeing data integration programs that directly enrich his former employer. And Clark Minor, newly appointed as chief information officer at the Department of Health and Human Services, previously held an executive role at Palantir – the same company that received nearly $300m in HHS contracts between 2021 and 2024.
Most striking is the Pentagon’s Detachment 201, created in June 2025 to encourage ‘innovation’, which includes four former tech executives from Palantir, Meta and OpenAI, elevated to the rank of lieutenant colonel (6). The distinction between contractor and commander, between profit-seeking and national defence, has been deliberately blurred.
Follow the money, and the pattern emerges. Founders Fund, Thiel’s $17bn flagship, reveals the architecture. In June 2025 it led Anduril’s funding round with a $1bn investment. As the first institutional investor in both Palantir and SpaceX, Founders Fund positioned itself early in the intelligence and orbital domains. But unlike traditional venture capital, it operates through direct strategic control. Trae Stephens serves simultaneously as fund partner and Anduril’s chairman. Delian Asparouhov divides his time between the fund and the presidency of Varda Space Industries, focused on orbital manufacturing and future space infrastructure. Scott Nolan runs General Matter while retaining his role at the fund. This is not passive capital allocation but active governance over firms reshaping state capacity.
1789 Capital epitomises how venture capital becomes dynasty. Founded by confidants of both Thiel and Vance, the fund transformed when Donald Trump Jr joined as a partner in November 2024. Growing from $150m to over $1bn, it brands itself as ‘patriotic investing’, and has already channelled over $50m into Musk’s empire (SpaceX for orbital dominance, xAI for military AI).
The Andreessen Horowitz fund – with assets of $600m – backs defence tech and what it calls ‘builders of the American state’. Founder Marc Andreessen himself rallied Silicon Valley’s billionaire class to support Trump’s 2024 campaign, fusing venture capital, ideology and state power in unprecedented ways. The returns validated the strategy. Palantir became the S&P 500’s best performer in 2025, with quarterly revenue exceeding $1bn – driven by 53% growth in government contracts.
When your customer cannot leave because you have become their operating system, you’ve transcended profit, you’ve achieved power. This is where the stakes become existential – not just for American democracy, but for European sovereignty too.
In Italy, defence chiefs plan to entrust the management of their encrypted satellite communications to Musk’s Starlink. In Germany, the use of Palantir’s surveillance tools by police in a number of Länder triggered strong protests (and a complaint to the constitutional court), but the federal authorities are looking at the possibility of extending their use to the whole country).
The Bundeswehr has been tied to Anduril’s autonomous systems since June, when Rheinmetall, Germany’s leading defence contractor, announced a partnership with the US firm that promises ‘European variants’ of Barracuda missiles and Fury autonomous aircraft which could be deployed across NATO. Yet the underlying dependencies remain American: European systems run on Lattice, receive continuous updates from servers in California and operate within parameters defined in Silicon Valley.
The UK faces an even deeper trap. The National Health Service (NHS) processes tens of millions of patient records on Palantir’s £330m Federated Data Platform. In May the government had to pay KPMG £8m to promote adoption among resistant hospital trusts. The £1.5bn defence partnership signed in September, making Britain a hub for Palantir’s military AI systems, compounds the dependency.
These decisions have not triggered parliamentary debates worthy of the name. Few have made the front page. Yet they reveal the eagerness with which European governments, delighted at the idea of strategic autonomy, are entrusting their powers to US platforms whose bosses are gleefully trampling on European democracy.
Each new contract deepens the trap. Once Palantir becomes indispensable to government operations, once Anduril’s drones become the NATO standard, once nuclear facilities power the AI systems running everything else, the transformation becomes irreversible.
What emerges is not traditional corporate capture but a fundamental transformation of sovereignty, from political authority exercised through relatively democratic institutions to technical capacity controlled through private ownership. While Brussels debates ‘digital sovereignty’, European ministries sign contracts that compromise future policy autonomy while embedding anti-democratic logic in governance infrastructure.
Silicon Valley’s political transformation in the Trump 2.0 era marks the maturation of what Evgeny Morozov calls ‘oligarch-intellectuals’, ‘new legislators’ using technological infrastructure to spread their gospel and engineer post-democratic governance. What began as a libertarian exit has evolved into authoritarian capture. The same network that once championed seasteading (the creation of autonomous nations in international waters) to escape state authority now places its members at the highest levels of government. Having failed to build parallel institutions, they have found it more effective to become the infrastructure of the state itself.
Their success has perhaps been most obvious in finance. Under Trump’s GENIUS Act, stable cryptocurrencies – ‘stablecoins’ – are reclassified as ‘national security infrastructure’, handing private issuers quasi-central bank powers. In June treasury secretary Bessent claimed they could create up to $2tn in new demand for US Treasury Bonds.
The techno-authoritarians know that to exercise power, one doesn’t need to win elections – only contracts. Each procurement cycle narrows democratic choice until choice itself becomes technically constrained by infrastructure built to serve investors, not citizens. Democracy persists only as a form of legacy interface, maintained for stability.
Reporter: Francesca Bria...Francesca Bria is an economist and founder of authoritarian-stack.info, an information platform on the inner workings of authoritarian tech firms in the US.
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