At the start of 2024, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI were united against military use of their AI tools. But over the next 12 months, something changed.
In January, OpenAI quietly rescinded its ban on using AI for “military and warfare” purposes, and soon after it was reported to be working on “a number of projects” with the Pentagon. In November, in the same week that Donald Trump was reelected US president, Meta announced that the United States and select allies would be able to employ Llama for defense uses. A few days later, Anthropic announced that it too would allow its models to be used by the military and that it was partnering with the defense firm Palantir. As the year ended, OpenAI announced its own partnership with the defense startup Anduril. Finally, in February 2025, Google revised its AI principles to allow for the development and use of weapons and technologies that might harm people. Over the course of a single year, worries about the existential risks of AGI had virtually disappeared, and the military use of AI had been normalized.
Part of the change has to do with the immense costs involved in building these models. Research on general-purpose technologies (the other GPTs) has often highlighted the importance of the defense sector as a way to overcome issues of adoption. “GPTs develop faster when there’s a large, demanding, and income-generating application sector,” economist David J. Teece wrote in 2018, “such as the US Defense Department’s purchases of early transistors and microprocessors.” The soft budget constraints and long-term nature of defense contracting, combined with the often blurry metrics of success, make the military a highly desirable customer for new technologies. Given the need of AI startups, in particular, to secure large and patient investments, the turn to military funding was perhaps inevitable. But this doesn’t explain the rapidity of the shift nor the fact that all the leading American AI research labs moved in the same direction.
The past few years have dramatically shifted the landscape of capitalist competition—from one guided by neoliberal free market ideals to one saturated with geopolitical concerns. To understand the shift from neoliberalism to geopolitics, one must grok the relationships between states and their large technology companies. Such state-capitalist relationships have been central to earlier formations of imperialism—Lenin famously characterized the imperialism of his era as a merger between monopoly capital and great powers—and they remained influential throughout the 20th century. In recent decades, this took the form of a broad consensus between the tech and political elite about digital technology’s role in innovation, growth, and state power.
Over recent years, however, this harmony of interests amongst elite groups has unraveled. A series of overlapping processes, gathering particular momentum in the 2010s, has dismantled this order, leaving behind the fragments of potentially new arrangements in both the United States and China.
The Silicon Valley Consensus
Up until about the mid-2010s, the United States was dominated by what might be called the Silicon Valley Consensus. Here there was a broad agreement across both the political elite and tech elite about the role of technology in the world, about what was required in order to allow that technology to flourish, about what purportedly American values they embodied, and about the requirements for capital accumulation in the technology sector. For both the tech elite and the political establishment, globalized communication, capital, data, and technology served their interests.
The Silicon Valley Consensus appealed to both tech and political elites because it was a belief in technology’s capacity to create an American-led world of borderless commerce and data. While the tech sector may have (initially) had more utopian impulses than the hardheaded geopolitical realism of the state, both could see their mutual projects achieved through the same means.
In practice, this meant a free hand was given to the tech sector, with regulations either conspicuously absent or curiously facilitating. Deregulation was of course a core element of the broader neoliberal period, but it particularly applied to tech companies with their capacity to confuse existing regulatory categories and “disrupt” existing rules. The lack of any significant federal privacy laws or action on the status of workers in the gig economy is indicative of this broad willingness to let digital firms act as they please. Under President Bill Clinton, the Framework for Global Electronic Commerce set out policies that, according to international studies professor Henry Farrell, succeeded in “discouraging policymakers from seeking to tax or regulate” the digital economy—and instead turned to voluntary, industry-led regulation. The core belief here—one that remains operative to this day—was that any regulation would simply get in the way of innovation and the expansion of US technology and power.
The regulation that did get passed was largely aimed at facilitating the expansion of digital firms. Section 230 in the Communications Decency Act of 1996, for instance, codified limited accountability for tech firms for what appeared on their online spaces—in stark contrast to other publishers. The result is that “courts applying this standard have dismissed a variety of claims against service providers including defamation, negligence, housing discrimination, and cyberstalking claims.” Section 230 also gave tech companies significant control over issues around content moderation, leaving them to decide what is and is not appropriate to appear on their services.
Abroad, the Silicon Valley Consensus meant having the state cajole other countries away from policies that might harm US digital technology companies. When France proposed a 3 percent tax on the platform giants, the United States threatened 100 percent tariffs in retaliation. France eventually proceeded anyway.
Efforts were also pushed to shape international trade rules in the image of the tech companies. A number of recent trade deals—such as the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement and the US-Japan Digital Trade Agreement—have embedded within them clauses that parallel the legal protections of Section 230. Invoking the same antiquated language of the 1990s law, the clauses around “interactive computer services” have aimed to spread the same legal protections that the digital firms receive in America into other countries. The effect is a significant expansion of protection from accountability, litigation, and other legal challenges. While countries are resisting, in Trump’s first term these trade agreements were seen as “gold standards” for how digital trade should look in future agreements.
Importantly, the Silicon Valley Consensus around economic and digital globalization also extended to China during this period. Not every fraction of American capital was happy to open up economic relations with China, and this formed a core tension between different elements of American capitalism in the 2000s particularly. Manufacturers were reluctant to let in cheap Chinese competitors, and organized labor resisted the outsourcing of jobs to China. The national security wing of the US state, meanwhile, also maintained concern about the potential geopolitical power of the Chinese state. But in determining the direction of US policy towards China, these groups lost out to a coalition of financial capital, platform capital, and large manufacturers looking to China as a cheap source of labor.
By the late 1990s, US policy turned significantly toward opening up to China, with the goal of incorporating it into the capitalist system. In 1998, Clinton made the first presidential visit to China since the crackdown on Tiananmen Square—demonstrating the rise of economic interests over human rights concerns. Soon after, a trade agreement was signed between the two countries and the US accepted China into the WTO.
Importantly, the fractions of American capital that supported these moves were also key buffers during potential geopolitical crises. They helped facilitate, political economist Ho-fung Hung writes in Clash of Empires, “quick, reconciliatory resolutions to crises such as the Taiwan missile crisis in 1996, the US bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999, and the clash between a US spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet over the South China Sea in 2001.” US capital, in other words, played an important role in keeping the peace and maintaining the growing economic integration.
For the leading tech companies, openness to China has been a major focus. Businesses like Apple came to rely heavily on low-wage Chinese labor to manufacture their products. As China has developed into a middle-income country, the attractiveness of its vast consumer market has grown as well, with many companies willing to accede to the Chinese state’s requirements for entry into the market.
The connections between US platform capital and the Chinese economy have extended to personal levels, with a variety of tech elites seeking to curry favor with Chinese leadership. In a particularly striking case, Mark Zuckerberg learned Chinese, declared himself to be reading Xi’s book of speeches, and during a meeting with Xi, reportedly asked him to give Zuckerberg’s unborn daughter an honorary Chinese name (Xi declined). Platform capital’s support for Chinese integration was a major touchstone of the Silicon Valley Consensus.
The consensus that held across the 2000s and much of the 2010s was therefore characterized by a broad harmony of interests across platform capital and the state. There was agreement around the importance of globalization, consisting of capitalist markets and underpinned by digital technologies. There was a shared desire for minimal regulation and maximal innovation, which were deemed to go hand in hand.
Throughout this period, economic interests were in the ascendant. Concerns about national security took a back seat and were largely thought to be dealt with via the expansion of commerce. Even the War on Terror, despite its rhetoric, was never an existential threat—never a conflict that warranted disruption to economic globalization. The centrality of economic interests and the rise of tech’s power gave them a driver’s seat, setting the direction of travel for society and the economy.
Consensus Undone
Today, the situation of platforms and states is very different. Geopolitical concerns now loom large in the mind of every policymaker and increasingly impact the investment decisions of capitalists. Prominent in this transformation is the emergence of a new fraction of Silicon Valley capital and a splitting of worldviews amongst the American tech elite.
On the one side, there remains a powerful group of tech companies that continue to benefit from globalized digital capitalism. These Big Tech firms have been socially liberal and economically neoliberal—as willing to adopt a sanitized form of identity politics as they are to use the state to facilitate their global expansion. These companies remain globalist in vision to this day, in no small part because their power and business relies upon a neoliberal world of free trade in goods, services, and data. At the same time, the Big Tech companies have also undergone a transformation over the past decade: They rely to a growing degree on the state as a defender of their interests abroad, they have increasingly become part of the national security state, and they have turned decisively against the liberal and left positions of their rank-and-file workers.
On the other side, there is the growing influence of a newly prominent tech right. In contrast to the more orthodox and unified neoliberals of Big Tech, this grouping contains a multitude of competing radical ideologies and ideas—from libertarian network state utopias to techno-monarchist visions to openly eugenicist views. This grouping has always existed to some degree in the Silicon Valley world, but in recent decades they largely receded to the background. Whereas much of Big Tech has traditionally been staunchly Democratic, this grouping has often been openly pro-Trump from the beginning. Peter Thiel was the first big tech-elite supporter of Trump in 2016, and Anduril’s founder Palmer Luckey has said he was fired from Meta for donating to Trump. (Meta denies this story.) While benefiting from Trump’s rise, this group’s newfound prominence also reflects broader changes: the rise of the far right across the world, the managerial crackdown on tech workers, and the broad post-neoliberal shift overseen by both Trump and President Biden.
The rise of geopolitical competition has also meant growing political attention, VC funding, and congressional budgets are available to capture. The old neoliberal ideas of connecting the world through corporate infrastructure have given way to visions of an irreconcilable great power conflict. And while the more neoliberal group either benefits significantly from the global spread of their businesses or relies in large part on exports, the new tech right often has the US government as a major customer and has security-driven desires to reshore manufacturing.
The rise of this competing center of tech power has meant that the consensus moment is over—and in its place, there is now a hegemonic struggle over how American tech and the American state will work together. Two of the biggest points of contention concern to what ends the tech elite and political elite work together, and what vision of the international order they entail.
On the first point, the new tech right invokes a transformation whereby the state-tech complex is not centered on the liberal expansion of digital markets, but instead on securing the nation in the face of geopolitical rivals. For the new tech right, the most prominent examples are the emerging defense tech startups that are aiming to replace the incumbent defense contractors. The stakes are high: The Pentagon spent over $14 trillion in the first two decades of the 21st century, with around one-third going just to the five largest contractors.
Against these incumbents, the new military industrial complex promises a far nimbler set of startups that offer quicker and more adaptive innovation. Venture capitalists have also broadly fallen in line with this new techno-nationalist viewpoint. Particularly influential, given the highly concentrated nature of the industry, have been the signals from leading firms like Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst. New investment funds are being created, and there is a growing and vocal group of VCs arguing for a turn to defense industrialization. There are early signs that a culture shift is also underway among the more rank-and-file workers of the tech sector. What was once a quite liberal space is now seeing a growing number of workers reject earlier protests against contracts with the military, seeing these protests as symptoms of an anti-American viewpoint.
While maintaining their globalized visions, the Big Tech fraction has also increasingly sought to ingratiate themselves more closely with national security agencies around the world. Amazon, in particular, has become a de facto essential infrastructure for the military—signing cloud computing deals with the CIA and other US intelligence agencies in 2013, a further deal in 2020, a $10 billion contract with the NSA in 2021, and a new contract with the US Army in 2024. But all of the cloud giants have created specialized infrastructures for security agencies and even for the traditional military industrial giants.
Beyond the flows of money, there are also the flows of personnel, with significant revolving doors between tech companies and the military ensuring tighter and more integrated networks between the two. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have all long carried on this practice, and in 2024 OpenAI joined the fray when it appointed Paul M. Nakasone, a former NSA official, to its board of directors. And as conflicts have emerged around the world, Big Tech companies are increasingly becoming active participants—from securing Ukrainian government data to providing infrastructure for Israel’s war in Gaza. The 21st-century national security state is increasingly being built on the infrastructure owned and operated by Big Tech, tying these digital giants into a new military industrial complex.
This raises a second major shift in the tech-state relationship—the changing visions of the international order. Alongside growing support for techno-nationalism, the national security interests in favor of stymying China have been let loose in recent years. Deploying a range of tools—tariffs, investment screening, export controls, and more—the US has definitively shifted away from the neoliberal era of globalization and free trade.
Rhetoric about the threat of Chinese competition has been weaponized by a number of tech companies to resist regulation. And the major AI startups have also recently begun pushing the narrative of a zero-sum struggle between the US and China. Sam Altman went from emphasizing the need to talk and engage with China about AI, to arguing in The Washington Post that the future of AI should be in the hands of a “US-led coalition of like-minded countries.”
Similarly, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, went from worrying about the dangers of an AI race between the US and China, to insisting that there is a division between democratic countries and authoritarian ones, and that democracies must win the struggle for AI. By contrast, the hyperscaler AI firms and semiconductor companies have largely refrained from stoking geopolitical tensions. As befitting their global footprint and desire for a more neoliberal world, they routinely advocate for a world built around the free flow of goods, services, and data instead.
All of this reflects a major breakdown of the Silicon Valley Consensus. Whereas once the united goal of the American state and platform capital was a globalized world of trade and technology, today we are seeing the techno-nationalistic fracturing of this order. The vaguely socially liberal elements of Silicon Valley are being attacked and replaced with an increasingly virulent right wing that is aligning with the state via government contracts and a bipolar vision of the world. Our period is characterized by competing hegemonic visions between a neoliberal globalization on the one hand and Manichean visions of the global order on the other hand, and we are in desperate need of alternatives. The future is far from settled.
Excerpt adapted from Silicon Empires: The Fight for the Future of AI, by Nick Srnicek. Published by arrangement with Polity Books. Copyright © 2026 Nick Srnicek.