On June 13th, 2025, four Big Tech executives, Andrew Bosworth (Meta’s Chief Technology Officer), Shyam Sankar (Palantir’s Chief Technology Officer), Kevin Weil (OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer), and Bob McGrew (OpenAI’s former Chief Research Officer) each secured the high rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S. Army. Granting private tech companies high-level security clearance and direct input into military strategy is both alarming and a clear escalation of tech power and an authoritarian state rapidly combining under Trump’s second term. What we are witnessing in real time is not only Big Tech providing the infrastructure that powers a police state but now also becoming official advisors to this police state as part of an authoritarian government. Commercial and national interests have merged into dangerous state power. Understanding how these players have been granted this access is critical to navigating how our movement can contest for power and control over how technology shapes our society. It’s paramount that we shift the common sense around what these Big Tech companies actually do to understand why they’ve been commissioned to serve the U.S. Army.
Starting with the most well-known and mainstream company, Meta is actually an ad company built on surveillance. Meta has four billion monthly users across Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger —making it the largest social media corporation in the world. Its business model depends on collecting data to sell targeted ads. The more data they collect from us, the more valuable the company is. The company’s surveillance is so strong that even if you delete your social media accounts, Meta can still track you. This is because of a computer code, called Meta Pixel, that allows websites to track visitors and share that information with Facebook. An investigation found that the pixel was present on 30 percent of the top 100,000 websites. What kind of data was Facebook collecting and from where? One-third of the top 100 U.S. hospitals were sending sensitive patient medical data to Facebook. The U.S. Department of Education was sharing data from their online application form for federal financial aid with Facebook, without the knowledge of the students or their parents. Crisis pregnancy centers, aka religiously aligned anti-abortion clinics, were sharing data with Facebook on whether a person was considering abortion or looking to get a pregnancy test or emergency contraceptives. This is high-level surveillance of our most private information. Surveillance and the police state go hand in hand.
The latest product from Meta is an even more invasive level of surveillance — Meta AI glasses. These glasses, consisting of a camera, microphone, an AI interface and internet access, can recognize faces, record interactions without consent, provide a summary of someone’s public online activity, and log whatever it sees. You don’t need to be a user of this Meta product or any other of the company’s products to be surveilled. Meta’s investing billions of dollars in AI is connected to its newfound patriotism. Seeds of Meta’s ascent to the U.S. Army can be traced back to November 2024, when Meta announced its generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, known as Llama, would be shared with the U.S. Military. Since then, Meta has bid on at least one contract with the U.S. Army, in partnership with Anduril, the defense-tech startup founded by Palmer Luckey. The $100 million contract is to create virtual and augmented reality headsets for the Army. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, also announced a partnership with Anduril, back in December, 2024 to supply the military with AI. Most recently, they secured a $200 million contract with the Department of Defense for “warfighting.” Meta and OpenAI securing wildly profitable government contracts is only going to increase. Trump’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” is a massive handout to the AI industry, allotting billions of dollars for “scaling of commercial technology for military use.”
The least surprising player appointed into the Army’s new “Executive Innovation Corps,” is Palantir. Palantir has a long history of working with the NSA for U.S. global spying and was linked to the Cambridge Analytica scandal that misused Facebook data to target voters in favor of Trump. Palantir is also behind Trump’s deportation machine, recently creating a new database called “ImmigrationOS” through a $30 million contract with ICE. Palantir is supercharging Trump’s data grabs behind what will be the largest database, full of sensitive information on all Americans. In March, Trump signed an executive order to “eliminate information silos” and share data across agencies. Now, all personal information, across 314 data categories – from health records, tax records, student loan debt, charitable contributions – are all being merged and compiled into one government database. And now, Trump is seeking to take data from State-run databases. This is another unprecedented move that violates our privacy. State government agencies are supposed to tell the public how they intend to use and safeguard personal data before they begin collecting it, and are not supposed to use data beyond that purpose. So what could go wrong with all of our data in one government database? Knowing this administration and how it colludes with Big Tech, the risk of abuse is high. Targeting immigrants and protestors is just the beginning.
To be clear, no one is hiding their intentions. Billionaire Peter Thiel, co-founder of Palantir and Trump-backer, stated back in 2010, “You could unilaterally change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who were never going to agree with you — through technological means. And this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”
Palantir stocks are at an all time high. Worth over $300 billion, Palantir relies on the government for over 40% of its revenue. The corruption is clear as day: From tech bros donating millions to get Trump elected to former Palantir staff being appointed to DOGE to Trump and his administration having stock in these tech companies to billions of dollars worth of government contracts going to Big Tech.
All of this — AI in the military, massive data collection, commercial private tech gaining high-level leadership in the Army – plus the corruption — is the face and the ultimate purpose of the Tech Oligarchy. And data and surveillance are their weapons against all of us.
