Artificial Intelligence

The Pentagon Is Eating Silicon Valley

An influx of military spending has been moving tech companies away from serving consumers and back toward chasing government contracts.

Matthew Petti | 10.8.2026 3:00 PM

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(Sharon Weinberger/Little Brown & Company)

Valley of Death: How Big Tech Is Fueling the Future of War, by Sharon Weinberger, Little, Brown and Company, 320 pages, $32

Donald Trump reportedly consulted a chatbot before attacking Venezuela. After an artificial intelligence told him Venezuelans would celebrate the overthrow of their regime, the president came away from the operation "thinking Grok was ingenious," Time reports, based on conversations with Trump and his advisers.

A few months later, another AI nearly started another war. With the help of a chatbot, someone at U.S. Special Operations Command wrote a report about a Chinese ship bringing nuclear weapons parts to Iran. The U.S. military nearly attacked the vessel before realizing that the chatbot had steered the official wrong, according to CNN.

Killer robots have long been a part of the popular imagination, but fewer people predicted automated yes-men whispering in the ears of military leaders. Weirder yet, these yes-men are a consumer product that anyone can use. Grok had 117 million monthly users as of March 2026, according to SpaceX corporate filings, and what U.S. Special Operations Command has is "mostly just copies of the commercial stuff wearing lipstick," an official told CNN. Last year, the U.S. military signed $200 million deals with OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI (owned by SpaceX) to integrate their systems with military databases.

"The most likely application of AI models" by the military is "identifying potential targets that could then be destroyed by weapons. In other words, the models, which are in some cases trained and refined on data from people seeking information on everything from medical problems to marital issues, could now be applied to warfare," Sharon Weinberger writes in her new book, Valley of Death. It's akin to the dilemma Weinberger notes about Amazon providing cloud computing for the U.S. government: "A company that has years of data on your purchases of everything from books to medications also provides remote servers for intelligence agencies."

Weinberger, a journalist who has been covering the weapons industry for more than two decades, argues that commercial tech companies and the military-industrial complex have fundamentally transformed each other. Rather than publicly........

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