Defense Innovation: When the Pentagon Moves to Silicon Valley

Defense innovation: when the Pentagon sets up shop in Silicon Valley

By Valentin Goujon

Mid-February, Anthropic’s language model found itself at the center of controversy between the California company and the US Department of Defense. Used in military operations, Claude illustrates the integration of regenerative artificial intelligence within the US war machine. This episode is part of the longer history of tensions caused by the increased convergence between the Pentagon and Silicon Valley since the 2010s.

If the links between Silicon Valley and the Pentagon are historical, they experienced a new momentum following Ashton B. Carter’s assumption of office as head of the Department of Defense (DoD) during Barack Obama’s second presidential term. Just two months after his appointment in February 2015, he became the first serving Secretary of Defense to make an official visit to the heart of Silicon Valley, at Stanford University, in nearly two decades.

Carter, recalling the moments of entanglement – from World War II to the Cold War – and those of friction – debates on asymmetric cryptography, Edward Snowden’s revelations on mass surveillance within the military-industrial complex. The wave of indignation caused by the programs of the National Security Agency (NSA) resulted in financial costs estimated at tens of billions of dollars for US digital companies, which lost international clients and had to invest more abroad to reassure them.

In addition, the respective temporalities of the two universes, between the bureaucratic slowness of defense markets and the rapid prototyping of Californian startups, benefit historical suppliers such as the “Big Five”: Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Boeing. These efforts of rapprochement are part of the strategy known as the “Third Offset,” led by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and then by his successor Carter, to offset the military advantages of rival countries – Russia and China – through targeted technological, operational, and organizational investments.

For Carter, the erosion of US military superiority

Valentin Goujon

Sociologist, Coordinator of the FlashLab seminar and the working group “Digital Materialities” associated with the Internet & Society Center.