John Mac Ghlionn contributes regularly to the Globe and other publications.
For two decades, the tech-accountability conversation was all about Big Tech. Facebook’s lies, Google’s search monopoly, Amazon’s warehouses, Apple’s app-store rents. These fights still matter. They have also become a useful diversion. While reporters chased a $450 million federal antitrust suit against Mark Zuckerberg, a cluster of small Silicon Valley firms was busy tightening their grip on the institutions of American government.
Call it Small Tech, with surveillance firm Palantir as its public face. The deeper roster runs through Anduril, Shield AI, Saronic, Scale AI, Vannevar Labs, Skydio, Epirus, and a dozen more startups bankrolled by the venture capital firm Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and Peter Thiel’s wider network. They sell drones, autonomous fighter jets, robotic warships, intelligence analytics, and the data pipelines feeding many models across the Department of Defense. What they sell is coercion infrastructure, and the customer is the United States government.
None of this emerged overnight. Palantir was seeded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s in-house venture capital firm, and post-9/11 counterterrorism dollars. Anduril came of age in the first Trump term, Shield AI in the final years of the Obama administration. The Pentagon’s Replicator initiative, announced in 2023, was designed to push billions toward exactly these sorts of firms.
What’s new isn’t the cohort itself but the convergence of three trends.
The first trend is scale. Anduril closed a $2.5 billion round of funding in June 2025, led by Founders Fund, valuing the company at $30.5 billion, more than double its valuation 10 months earlier. The Air Force has selected Anduril to build near-final versions of AI-powered drone aircraft designed to fly alongside human-piloted fighter jets. The Army is paying the company inordinate sums of money to design advanced wearable tech and gear for future infantry soldiers. Palantir’s defense and intelligence work has expanded across the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI. No Bush-era ledger has columns wide enough for this sort of arrangement.
The second is procurement. On April 9, 2025, President Trump signed Executive Order 14265, “Modernizing Defense Acquisitions and Spurring Innovation in the Defense Industrial Base.” The order directed the Pentagon to favor commercial solutions, rely on the Other Transactions Authority — a legal carve-out that lets the military buy from companies without going through the usual competitive process — and reduce the acquisition workforce that enforces competitive bidding. Shortly after, Trump signed EO 14275, ordering a sweeping rewrite of the Federal Acquisition Regulation itself. Translated out of bureaucratese, the rules that slow Lockheed Martin to a crawl are being filed down for firms that can deliver in months rather than years. Defenders of the overhaul argue this is overdue, since the existing system can take a decade or more to field new weapons and faster procurement could help the United States keep pace with rivals like China. Whether the reforms deliver that speed without sacrificing the accountability that competitive bidding is meant to enforce remains an open question.
The third trend is personnel. Michael Kratsios, confirmed in March 2025 as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, was managing director at Scale AI between his two stints in government. His earlier career runs through Thiel Capital, where he served as Peter Thiel’s chief of staff. David Sacks, the White House AI and crypto czar, cofounded Craft Ventures, an early backer of Palantir. A December 2025 New York Times investigation found that he and his firm hold positions in 449 companies tied to AI, including Anduril. Trae Stephens cofounded Anduril, chairs it today, and remains a partner at Founders Fund; he was reportedly on the shortlist to become the deputy defense secretary in late 2024. Though passed over, he remains a deeply influential whisperer in the Pentagon’s ear.
And then there is the most naked version of the same dynamic. The US Air Force is buying interceptor drones from Powerus, a Florida company partly owned by Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. The president’s sons profit directly from a defense contract awarded by their father’s administration. Where the Sacks and Stephens arrangements at least require a flowchart to trace, this one needs no diagram at all. The commander in chief signs the procurement reforms, the Pentagon writes the checks, and his sons cash them. If the Anduril-Founders Fund-Kratsios circuit represents the laundered version of state capture, Powerus is the unlaundered version.
All of this is troubling enough. But hell, as it turns out, has a basement. And a subbasement. And a parking garage.
In February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a man whose primary preparation for managing the world’s largest military was reading teleprompters at dawn, sat across from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and demanded he abandon the company’s safeguards against autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. If Anthropic refused, Hegseth told him, the Pentagon would invoke the Defense Production Act, a Korean War-era statute that lets the president compel a private company to produce on the government’s terms. The administration would also designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk,” a label previously reserved for technologies that might help foreign adversaries sabotage American defense systems. One AI policy analyst called the designation “attempted corporate murder.”
Anthropic refused to budge, but the lesson on offer was far from subtle. Cooperate and the contracts flow. Resist and the government begins floating the idea of nationalizing your model outright.
Big Tech wanted a friendlier regulator, but Small Tech wants to become the nervous system of the state. The targeting software, the surveillance towers, the autonomous strike platforms, the data plumbing — all delivered by firms whose investors and former executives now hold the pens that write the contracts those firms win.
Yes, the revolving door has spun since fax machines were the future. Retired generals have always cashed in on Lockheed boards. What’s different now is the synchronicity and the sheer brazenness of it. The conflict-of-interest waivers issued to David Sacks alone read, as one ethics scholar told NPR, like “a presidential pardon in advance.” The same handful of people raised the funds, built the companies, ran the transitions, drafted the policy, wrote the executive orders, and approved the contracts, all inside an expedited time frame. The machinery of government is now changing at the speed of the technology it is buying. Moore’s Law has arrived in Washington.
A republic that lets its weapons designers also draft the rules governing their purchase hasn’t abolished oversight so much as privatized it. Big Tech was, and remains, a serious problem. But Small Tech is a different animal entirely. The former sought influence over the state; the latter seeks to become it.