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Archaeologists Found a Legendary Set of Golden Armor Many Thought Didn’t Exist
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For nearly two decades, the highly selective startup accelerator Y Combinator (YC) kick-started what would become some of the most popular apps on your smartphone. The venture capital fund-meets-ideas lab incubated well-known companies across a range of industries, like DoorDash, Coinbase, Airbnb, Instacart, Reddit and Gusto.
Silicon Valley Goes To War
The tech industry’s whiz kids once promised convenience at your fingertips. Now they’re embracing the military-industrial complex to defend the West.
Then, in August 2024, it diverged from its consumer-facing portfolio and, for the first time in its history, underwrote the weapons company Ares Industries. The El Segundo, Calif.-based defense startup’s goal is to build low-cost anti-ship cruise missiles to help Washington win a hypothetical war against China in the Taiwan Strait. The one-line YC bio, no longer visible on the website, for Ares cofounder Alex Tseng previously read: “Missiles are cool.”
War drones are unlikely to be what most people picture when they think of the Silicon Valley that led the consumer internet revolution. Since the 2000s, America’s tech companies have pioneered the idea that their digital innovations don’t just provide convenience but also create a global village that is “more open and connected,” as Mark Zuckerberg put it. Big tech went all-in on this progressive ethos, which it also used to market its work as transcending borders and delivering a global public good: democratizing information, building connections and spurring creativity. For years, the Valley shied away from military technology. But that was then.
Today, YC’s increasing investment in defense tech startups is a microcosm of a broader industry shift — from building consumer and business applications to now embracing the technology of warfare. Such a shift for a respected incubator that attracts the crème de la crème of startup offerings is exemplary of the industry’s multi-year shift toward investing in warfare tech; it’s gone mainstream. While tech companies once downplayed their military contracts, the defense tech sector’s loudest voices now argue that their focus must move from consumer diversions to defending their nation.
Alex Karp, who founded Palantir in 2003 alongside entrepreneur Peter Thiel and others, bemoaned in a new book co-written with the company’s legal counsel Nicholas Zamiska, that Silicon Valley has “lost its way” for viewing the U.S. government as “an impediment to innovation and a magnet for controversy.” The country’s best engineers worked on delivery apps when they could’ve contributed to America’s military strength.
Silicon Valley has apparently begun to wake up, as investments and valuations in defense tech have ballooned. In just five years, from 2019 to 2024, venture capital investment in U.S. defense-tech startups grew more than 10 times, reaching around $3 billion, according to Crunchbase data.
This past year alone, the Austin, Texas-based Saronic Technologies, founded in 2022, raised $600 million to build AI-powered autonomous warships. And Shield AI, founded in 2015, raised $240 million to scale its autonomy software suite for AI-powered military drones and aircraft systems; the San Diego-based company is now valued at $5.3 billion. Venture capital deals in defense tech startups have reached a record high in 2025, with valuations doubling from the previous year, according to PitchBook estimates.
There are many similar success stories across the sector. The Costa Mesa, Calif.-based Anduril Industries recently raised another $2.5 billion to replace traditional defense contractors with modernized commercial tech. Founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, the inventor of the Oculus VR headset, the $30.5-billion Anduril is building a $1 billion weapons factory in Ohio. Another defense tech sweetheart, Palantir, which provides analytics software to the U.S. military and law enforcement, was added to the S&P 500 index in September 2024.
Such an alliance between the Pentagon and American tech firms is not new; in fact, it’s a legacy of the Cold War era. Though tech entrepreneurs have often waxed nostalgic about their supposed libertarian origin stories, big government subsidies through defense budgets and federal research grants helped fund much of the era’s innovation.
Stanford University, under engineering dean and then provost Fred Terman, made the most of postwar America’s growing military-industrial complex: The university became a top federal grant recipient and a major supplier of scientific talent for defense projects. Security anxieties among officials at the U.S. Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission resulted in government cash injections that provided resources for education and research without near-term commercial pressure. In 1951, Stanford received less than $2 million from government contracts and federal grants. Nearly a decade later, in 1960, as the space race against the Soviet Union intensified, that number more than quadrupled to $8.3 million. Stanford had effectively become what historian Rebecca S. Lowen called the “cold war university.”
“For years, the Valley shied away from military technology. But that was then.”
Defense contracts also became the backbone of the region’s industry. The Stanford Research Institute, founded in 1946, separated from the university in 1970 and later rebranded as SRI International, produced early computing research for defense clients. Varian Associates, incorporated by Stanford physicists and others, made klystrons for radar and military communications.
By the time the so-called “traitorous eight” employees left Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to found Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, the cutting edge of semiconductor development — the technology that became Silicon Valley’s namesake — was in satellites and missile guidance systems.
Before the personal computer industry took over, Santa Clara County’s largest employer was none other than Lockheed Missiles and Space Company. The Southern California aerospace manufacturer Lockheed Corporation (which would later merge with Martin Marietta in 1995 to form Lockheed Martin) opened an outpost in Sunnyvale in 1956, where it designed classified satellites and missiles for America’s Cold War arsenal.
Skepticism of military technology did grow, however, amid the 1960s counterculture. Northern Californians, including students at the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford, protested the region’s military-industrial complex’s design of killing machines for use in an unjust war in Vietnam. In addition to pacifist calls to end the war, the media historian Fred Turner describes in his book, “From Counterculture to Cyberculture,” how the era’s activists feared that technological systems of command and control, while built for use against foreign enemies, would turn into tools of authoritarian hierarchy and bureaucratic centralization for use against democratic Americans.
Rather than rejecting technology altogether, a group of counterculture figures sought to take tools with military origins — psychedelics, radios, computers — from the Leviathan. In fighting wars, computers might’ve been built for command and control, but when packaged for the everyday consumer, they could become platforms for creativity and individualism.
In 1975, Silicon Valley hobbyists, including the antiwar computer engineer Lee Felsenstein and future Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, convened as the informal Homebrew Computer Club to experiment with small, portable computers for personal use. While the precursor to the internet was developed with defense funding, this group of hobbyists — part of a movement that Turner has referred to as New Communalism — saw computer networks not as a communication technology for the battlefield, but as a self-organized community of personal expression.
As the Cold War came to an end, a new generation of engineers who called themselves hackers wanted cyberspace to be open, globally accessible and free from government intervention. They protested U.S. export controls on encryption algorithms, which they believed to be a public good. They also opposed the Clinton administration’s adoption of the Clipper Chip, a government backdoor in communication devices, in the name of national security.
By the end of the century, cyberlibertarian political activist John Perry Barlow declared that cyberspace — which had only 13 years earlier been a Department of Defense special project — must be free from government control. “We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth,” Barlow, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, wrote.
The early days of consumer internet were marked by an anti-authoritarian, anti-military culture. Multibillion-dollar companies publicly shied away from military work, which was seen as regressive and low-status. Google’s unofficial motto, until it transformed into Alphabet in 2018, was “don’t be evil.” Concern for the ethics of technology might have been lip service, but tech workers tried to hold them accountable. In 2018, after Google announced Project Maven, which aimed to use AI to analyze drone images for the Pentagon, more than 4,000 employees protested the effort, arguing that “Google should not be in the business of war,” and some resigned. Faced with internal dissent, the company did not renew its Maven contract.
A Return To The Past
Despite the antagonism to defense tech, Silicon Valley’s role in the military-industrial complex persisted well into the 21st century. Palantir Technologies was founded in 2003 to fight the war on terror and continues to provide intelligence analytics software for the military and law enforcement. Tech giants like Intel Corp. and Oracle Corp. have continued to profit off defense work, and software companies like Google and Microsoft actively pursue military and intelligence contracts. The revelations of the Snowden leaks further showed the complicity of American tech companies in the nation’s ever-expanding digital surveillance apparatus. After Maven, Google’s military work resumed quietly. In 2021, the company agreed to work on Project Nimbus, a cloud computing contract for the Israeli military, despite internal concerns that the program could enable human rights abuses in the West Bank.
“An alliance between the Pentagon and American tech firms is not new; in fact, it’s a legacy of the Cold War era.”
While military technology was treated as taboo in the 2000s and 2010s, the Valley now openly embraces its military roots. Once-attractive consumer-facing technologies like online marketplaces, digital advertising, social media and gig work apps have become increasingly saturated, despite their fast growth in the 2010s. “Perhaps there aren’t as many big breakthroughs left in consumer internet. The big ideas have been tried,” observed the venture capitalist and Palantir cofounder Thiel in 2018.
But as the U.S. finds itself enmeshed in hot wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and a great-power rivalry with China, tech companies have identified future profits from public-private partnerships enabled by an ever-growing U.S. defense budget. “There is more AI in a Tesla than in any U.S. military vehicle; better computer vision in your Snapchat app than in any system the Department of Defense owns; and, until 2019, the United States’ nuclear arsenal operated off floppy disks,” an Anduril blog post in 2022 stated.
Venture capitalists once shied away from defense tech partly because they couldn’t see themselves playing the insider’s game against traditional contractors. Today, most U.S. defense contracts go to a handful of manufacturers, like Lockheed Martin Corp., General Dynamics Corp., and The Boeing Company. By contrast, today, less than 1% of the total Department of Defense budget goes to the top 100 venture-backed defense tech companies, according to the Silicon Valley Defense Group. In 2025, these companies raised far more in private capital — more than $70 billion — than in federal awards, which have so far totaled $29 billion.
Read Noema in print.
Silicon Valley’s response is to move fast and break things. To disrupt the existing defense sector, it’ll have to revive the era of competition that was put to bed in 1993. That was when the Clinton administration’s Secretary of Defense, Les Aspin, hosted the infamous “Last Supper” and told defense contractors’ executives that the industry must consolidate or it would not survive. The number of large defense contractors dropped from more than 50 to just five today.
“Everyone, including the Russians and the Chinese, have [sic] given up on communism except for Cuba and the DOD,” lamented Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, who wants defense-tech companies to innovate and scale rapidly in what he called the era of the “First Breakfast,” a spin on the earlier “Last Supper.” The absence of competition among weapons makers, he argued, had weakened America’s ability to resurrect an industrial base. “We run a centrally unplanned process that neither has the supposed advantages of a planned economy nor the (far superior) advantages of a free market,” he wrote.
But venture capitalists now see a window of opportunity. Since 2022, the war in Ukraine has put venture-backed defense products to the test, sometimes through private funding and donations. The Pentagon now wants to be a “true innovation ecosystem,” according to former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who led the establishment of the Office of Strategic Capital in 2022 under President Biden to secure private-sector investment in defense tech. Austin wants to conquer the “valley of death,” the long, suffocating gap between military innovation in the private sector and the government contracts that take years to arrive.
Then came the 2024 election, which brought Silicon Valley onto Capitol Hill. The alignment between the tech industry’s most vocal conservatives and the Trump administration has taken Californian disruptors to Washington. Chief among them was, of course, Elon Musk, whose aerospace company SpaceX is now the Pentagon’s top rocket provider. On the eve of President Trump’s June parade commemorating the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday, the U.S. Army swore in four tech executives — including Sankar, who had suggested the idea of an army innovation corps of corporate advisors in the first place — as lieutenant colonels, with the hopes of bringing their tech expertise to the future of warfare.
The Democracy Paradox
To Thiel, an early investor in Facebook, it’s not worth crying over dissipating opportunity in areas like social media. He has long believed that, despite its modern importance, the internet has failed to deliver the kind of technological progress seen in most of the 20th century. “We were promised flying cars,” his famous mantra went, “and instead, we got 140 characters.”
Thiel’s view has been echoed by the economist Tyler Cowen, who believes that the U.S. has largely been stagnant in scientific and technological progress since the 1970s. In 1969, man landed on the Moon; by 1976, the supersonic airliner flew passengers between New York and London. As the stagnation hypothesis went, the digital revolution over the last five decades was remarkable, but outside of it, development in the hard sciences — in manufacturing, energy, transportation and biotechnology — has stalled.
“The early days of consumer internet were marked by an anti-authoritarian, anti-military culture.”
While the U.S. seems to have slowed in these areas, China appears to have accelerated. It is quickly surpassing the U.S. in electric vehicles, robotics, batteries and drones. It has made significant breakthroughs in satellites and nuclear reactors, and its biotech industry is advancing its development of innovative drugs at an unprecedented pace. Despite U.S. export controls, Beijing is on its way to achieving self-reliance in critical technologies such as advanced semiconductors.
Many in the tech industry anticipate that an arms race with China will spur new technological innovation not just in areas such as weapons manufacturing and cybersecurity, but also in emerging technology beyond the traditional parameters of military defense. In a widely circulated 2024 essay titled “Situation Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner argued that the AI arms race against China would be the decisive factor in whether the U.S. maintains its military supremacy, and that it’s crucial for the U.S. to achieve superintelligence, or AGI, before Beijing. “The free world,” the German researcher Aschenbrenner wrote, “must prevail over the authoritarian powers in this race.” For Aschenbrenner, the safety challenges posed by AGI can only be mitigated by liberal democracies sustaining a “healthy lead” vis-à-vis Washington’s adversaries.
But there is no definitive evidence that AGI is among Beijing’s top strategic priorities. Close observers of Chinese policy have noted that supply chain self-dependence and diffusion of AI across industries, not the abstract frontier of superintelligence, are the country’s paramount concerns. But Aschenbrenner’s unsubstantiated thesis of a decisive arms race has been taken up by China hawks in both California and Washington. Jacob Helberg, formerly a senior advisor at Palantir and now an undersecretary of state in the Trump administration, believes that “China is racing towards AGI … It’s critical that we take them extremely seriously.” In November 2024, the bipartisan U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, where Helberg served as a commissioner, advised Congress to fund “a Manhattan Project-like program dedicated to racing to and acquiring an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) capability.”
America’s AI companies agree. “It is critically important that the U.S. maintains its lead in developing AI with democratic values,” read Sam Altman’s first message to Trump after his victory in November. In response to the “DeepSeek moment” in January, Anthropic cofounder Dario Amodei called for continued U.S. export restrictions to prevent Chinese models from accessing advanced chips. Despite DeepSeek’s success, he wrote, it is “beholden to an authoritarian government that has committed human rights violations, has behaved aggressively on the world stage, and will be far more unfettered in these actions if they’re able to match the U.S. in AI.” Export controls, he stressed, “serve a vital purpose: keeping democratic nations at the forefront of AI development.”
(In July, Amodei reportedly sought investment from the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, a decision he was “not thrilled about” but justified as necessary. “‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on,” he wrote in an internal memo.) President Trump has since loosened these export controls. In December, he allowed Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips to China — in a sharp, controversial reversal from previous U.S. policy.
The patriotism among the Silicon Valley set may be genuine, but it is nonetheless self-serving. On his second day in office, Trump announced Stargate, a joint venture between Oracle, SoftBank Group Corp. and Altman’s OpenAI to build AI datacenters in the U.S., with a planned investment of $500 billion — an astronomical figure — by 2029.
The narrative of an arms race conveniently supports these tech evangelists’ quest for unconditional technological progress — a moral vision that has also been recently pushed forward by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs like Marc Andreessen. A self-identified effective accelerationist, he believes that progress in science and technology must be achieved at all costs, dismissing normative concerns about sustainability, social responsibility and tech ethics.
“Our enemy is deceleration, de-growth, depopulation — the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and death,” Andreesen wrote in the widely circulated “Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” published in October 2023.
Unlike the quiet collaborations we’ve seen over the first two decades of the century, many in the Valley are now proudly supporting America’s military rejuvenation. Andreessen, who in the mid-1990s gave us the then-most popular web browser Netscape, defended America’s technological strength: “Technologically strong liberal democracies safeguard liberty and peace. Technologically weak liberal democracies lose to their autocratic rivals, making everyone worse off.”
“Unlike the quiet collaborations we’ve seen over the first two decades of the century, many in the Valley are now proudly supporting America’s military rejuvenation.”
Palantir’s Karp went one step further, claiming the company’s core mission “always was to make the West, especially America, the strongest in the world, the strongest it’s ever been, for the sake of global peace and prosperity.” Alexandr Wang, the Los Alamos-born Scale AI co-founder who recently joined Meta as its chief AI officer, believes deploying AI for U.S. national security is a “moral imperative.”
OpenAI, which had restricted the use of its products for “weapons development” and “military and warfare,” removed this clause from its usage policies in early 2024 and secured a $200 million contract from the U.S. Department of Defense last June. That same month, Anthropic also announced its new Claude Gov model to bring artificial intelligence to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies. In February 2025, Google removed language from its AI principles that had been in place since 2018, stating it would not deploy AI weapons or technological systems that violate international law and human rights.
“There’s a global competition taking place for AI leadership within an increasingly complex geopolitical landscape,” Google wrote in a blog post following the removal. “We believe democracies should lead in AI development, guided by core values like freedom, equality, and respect for human rights.”
Yet this moralistic rhetoric — that it’s imperative to defend U.S. technological primacy to ensure autocrats won’t use technology for oppression — reveals an inconvenient paradox. While it is evident that China’s use of technology for surveillance, control and repression is deeply concerning, the moral imperative of the U.S. to prevent the nation state’s abuses is eroded by the fact that U.S. companies have profited from similar practices. At home, Palantir is building surveillance and identification tools in the service of Trump’s mass deportation of undocumented immigrants. Like the Chinese tech companies that help the Communist Party surveil its dissidents and control its Muslim minorities, Silicon Valley is now enabling the buildup of America’s own police state.
Tech leaders in the U.S. are worried about propaganda and censorship in AI systems, should the systems that succeed be under Chinese control; however, U.S.-controlled AI systems are already vulnerable to political manipulation. Musk’s xAI chatbot Grok has cosplayed as Hitler and forced the narrative of “white genocide” in South Africa into repeated responses. More recently, as TikTok sold its U.S. business to American investors, including President Trump’s billionaire ally Larry Ellison, concerns about potential censorship — not from the Chinese this time, but from the U.S. — have surfaced.
Abroad, U.S. companies like Microsoft continue to supply cloud computing and AI services to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel, despite humanitarian concerns in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Such applications of emerging technology, condemned almost universally by human rights groups, hardly resemble the liberal-democratic values the tech industry’s militarists have vowed to defend. American technology companies want to boost national competitiveness, but in the age of Trump, many have cozied up to an administration that, according to its critics, frequently violates democratic values.
Today, America’s best and brightest find themselves drawn to working on what might be advertised as the next Manhattan Project. Venture capitalists are nostalgic about the technological progress made amid the Cold War. As historical episodes of McCarthyism and the possibilities of nuclear apocalypse have shown, technological militarism has real perils. The moral gravity of actions or errors can be far greater than a glitch on a smartphone app. Simply brushing away these worries with flag-waving nationalism is unlikely to advance democracy or accountability.
We’re at a time when America’s foundational institutions are facing existential risks; however enthusiastic one might be for a world where democratic technologies dominate, that future is jeopardized by the illiberal means to get there. That said, one thing is clear: The Silicon Valley that once wanted to bring the world together appears to be no more. With the rise of techno-nationalism, we may soon reminisce fondly about those bygone days when college dropouts vowed to “make the world a better place” — however naïve those aspirations turned out to be.
Mr And Mrs Parshuram
