Sheera Frenkel
In a ceremony in June at Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall in Arlington, Va., four current and former executives from Meta, OpenAI and Palantir lined up onstage to swear an oath to support and defend the United States. The U.S. Army had just created a technical innovation unit for the executives, who were dressed in combat gear and boots. At the event, they were pronounced lieutenant colonels in the new unit, Detachment 201, which will advise the Army on new technologies for potential combat.
“We desperately need what they are good at,” Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll said of the tech executives, who have since undergone basic training. “It’s an understatement how grateful we are that they are taking this risk to come and try to build this out with us.” ImageAndrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer; Bob McGrew, an adviser at Thinking Machines Lab and OpenAI’s former chief research officer; Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer; and Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer at a military ceremony in June.Credit...Staff Sgt. Leroy Council/United States Army
The military is not just courting Silicon Valley tech companies. In the age of President Trump, it has successfully recruited them. Over the past two years, Silicon Valley’s leaders and investors — many of whom had once forsworn involvement in weapons and war — have plunged headfirst into the military industrial complex. Meta, Google and OpenAI, which once had language in their corporate policies banning the use of artificial intelligence in weapons, have removed such wording. OpenAI is creating anti-drone technology, while Meta is making virtual reality glasses to train soldiers for battle.
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