{"id":307544,"date":"2025-11-17T12:00:25","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T12:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=307544"},"modified":"2025-11-14T09:51:22","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T09:51:22","slug":"ai-warlords-and-the-military-industrial-complex","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/11\/ai-warlords-and-the-military-industrial-complex\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Warlords and the Military-Industrial Complex"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

30 Oct 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0In August, Foreign Affairs<\/i> published Alphabet-Google billionaire Eric Schmidt\u2019s essay \u201cThe Dawn of Automated Warfare<\/a>\u201d\u2014co-authored with Greg Grant of the Center for New American Security<\/a>, a nonprofit funded by Schmidt and the military industry.<\/p>\n

Best characterized as an advertorial, the AI weapons piece promotes Schmidt\u2019s investments in military AI, including Ukrainian drone manufacturer White Stork<\/a>, and Relativity Space<\/a>, a military rocket contractor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The authors frame Ukraine\u2019s battlefields as laboratories for testing AI weapons in \u201cthe new reality of war.\u201d From their profit-seeking perspective, mass death and suffering are collateral effects justified by \u201cracing to create \u2026 an automated drone swarm\u2014the holy grail of drone operations.\u201d<\/p>\n

The sane response to such callous marketing disguised as objective analysis by a stakeholding multibillionaire is revulsion and disbelief. But, such is the halo of entrepreneurial genius and progressive philanthropy crowning the 70-year-old Democrat Party sugar<\/a> daddy, that Schmidt\u2019s pronouncements are treated as oracular in corridors of government where he exercises undue influence alongside fellow billionaire AI militarists Musk, Zuckerberg, Ellison, Bezos, Thiel, Hoffman, Bloomberg, Andreessen, Altman, Huang, Son, the Trumps, and Kushners.<\/p>\n

Since 2016, investigative reports in major media have documented serious conflicts of interest between Schmidt\u2019s governmental positions and his $30 billion in private investments and the multibillion-dollar stock portfolios managed by his nonprofit foundations. But Schmidt and his similarly conflicted tech mogul demographic remain politically immunized against punishment\u2014or paying taxes<\/a>\u2014by the violence-energized system that created and enriches them.<\/p>\n

Schmidt\u2019s conflicts of interest<\/b><\/p>\n

In 2016, when Schmidt served as CEO of Alphabet-Google, The Intercept <\/i>and the Tech Transparency Project published The Android Administration<\/a>, illuminating the incestuous relationship between the Obama administration and 152 Google executives: \u201cGoogle doesn\u2019t just lobby the White House for favors, but collaborates with officials, effectively serving as a sort of corporate extension of government operations.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s doors were always open to executives from Schmidt\u2019s investment firm, Tomorrow Ventures<\/a>, and Civis Analytics, an AI data firm controlled by Schmidt that is a federal contractor<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 2019, Politico<\/i> published<\/a> \u201cHow Amazon and Silicon Valley Seduced the Pentagon,\u201d highlighting Schmidt\u2019s activities as chair of the Defense Innovation Board<\/a>, a quasi-governmental body composed of militaristic capitalists such as Michael Bloomberg<\/a> and Reid Hoffman, who is also a board member of the genocide-abetting<\/a> Microsoft Corporation. The Defense Innovation Board develops military contracting policies that impact companies controlled by Schmidt and other board members.<\/p>\n

In 2021, American Prospect<\/i> exposed<\/a> that Rebellion Defense<\/a>, a military and security tech company that Schmidt owns, was vacuuming up military AI contracts while he chaired the Defense Innovation Board and the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence.<\/p>\n

As Schmidt\u2019s reputation was spoiling, New York Times<\/i> tech reporters tried to refresh it, \u201cupdating\u201d a previously published hagiography<\/a>. Brushing past Schmidt\u2019s well-documented conflicts, Kate Conger and Cade Metz explained that the philanthropic venture capitalist had simply \u201creinvented himself as the prime liaison between Silicon Valley and the military industrial complex.\u201d<\/p>\n

In May 2022, the Tech Transparency Project published a blockbuster series detailing the scope of Schmidt\u2019s influence<\/a> over military AI contracting and his many conflicts of interest<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In December 2022, referencing CNBC reporting<\/a> on Schmidt\u2019s conflicts, Senator Elizabeth Warren formally<\/a> requested that the Secretary of Defense investigate Schmidt; there is no available record of a reply.<\/p>\n

In May 2023, Le Monde<\/i> highlighted<\/a> the synergies between Schmidt\u2019s business interests and his calls to prepare for warring with China. Fox News<\/i> reported on an investigation by the MAGA-friendly Bull Moose Project, which charted the intersections<\/a> of Schmidt\u2019s interlocking business and governmental networks. Jack Poulson\u2019s All Source Intelligence<\/i> published<\/a> additional evidence of conflicts of interest between Google and Schmidt, including collaborating with US and Australian intelligence agencies.<\/p>\n

These are but a few examples of the flood of expos\u00e9s, amplified by hundreds of news outlets, that could have prompted<\/a> federal agencies to bar Schmidt from military contracting for influence peddling. But Schmidt\u2019s military businesses thrived during the Trump I and Biden years, and continue to do so under Trump II. In June 2025, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine<\/a>, a military AI venture capitalist associated with the Trump\u2013Kushner family\u2019s Thrive Capital<\/a>, was tasked with delivering the keynote<\/a> address at a June 2025 conference called AI+ Expo, sponsored by Schmidt\u2019s Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP).<\/p>\n

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence was dissolved in 2021 after concluding<\/a> that the US must buy more military AI products to face off against China. Schmidt then transmuted the federal commission into the SCSP, a partially tax-exempt private<\/a> foundation he funded<\/a> and governs<\/a>, which opposes AI regulation.<\/p>\n

Most of SCSP\u2019s fifty-member staff have worked for either the Commission, the Pentagon, intelligence agencies, or Wall Street firms. SCSP leadership includes the Center for a New American Security\u2019s Robert O. Work<\/a> and Mich\u00e8le Flournoy<\/a>. Both are Pentagon careerists turned lobbyists for military AI. To direct his military AI lobby, Schmidt hired the commission\u2019s director, Ylli Bajraktari<\/a>, the former chief of staff to Trump\u2019s national security advisor, retired Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, also a prominent military AI promoter<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Tax-avoidant<\/a>, Schmidt hires former national security officials to operate his interlocking network of businesses and tax-exempt organizations. He also places his employees and grantees in influential governmental positions, paying their salaries via his for-profit organization, Schmidt Futures<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Unholy AI alliances<\/b><\/p>\n

Schmidt credits the late, and credibly<\/a> accused war criminal, Henry Kissinger, with having inspired him to create SCSP. Schmidt modeled SCSP after Kissinger\u2019s Special Studies Project (1956\u20131960), which oil and railroad billionaire John D. Rockefeller bankrolled<\/a> through his Rockefeller Brothers Fund. History records<\/a> that the Rockefeller study rationalized minimizing social spending to free up larger portions of the gross national product for the nuclear arms race.<\/p>\n

Media amplification of the study influenced public opinion to support the Cold War by demonizing Russia and China as existential threats to American values, by which the Rockefellers meant plutocracy, not democracy.<\/p>\n

Kissinger opposed arms control efforts. He advocated fighting \u201climited\u201d nuclear wars with intercontinental ballistic missiles. He falsely claimed the US was militarily disadvantaged because Russia fielded more nuclear missiles, while the opposite was known to be the case. The Rockefeller study he crafted helped institutionalize what outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower called<\/a> a danger to democracy when he left office in 1960. The former Army general presciently predicted \u201cthat public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite\u201d operating a perpetually war-seeking \u201cmilitary-industrial complex.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2021, Kissinger, Schmidt, and MIT computer scientist Daniel Huttenlocher published the bestselling book, The Age of AI.<\/i> They advocated spending vast amounts of public wealth developing AI weapons of mass destruction for use against China.<\/p>\n

Their arguments are framed in terms of seventeenth-century rationalist philosophy. They hail the solipsistic Cartesian worldview as the epitome of Reason, acting as if the wisdom of all previous ages culminated in the anti-democratic<\/a> musings of Immanuel Kant, who avidly supported aristocratic rule. \u201cThe AI age needs its own Descartes, its own Kant, to explain what is being created and what it will mean for humanity. \u2026 Existing principles [of human reasoning] will not apply.\u201d For Schmidt, Kissinger, and Huttenlocher, artificial intelligence is the New Enlightenment.<\/p>\n

The Age of AI<\/i> echoes the factual dishonesty and\u00a0omnicidal sociopathy of Herman Kahn\u2019s 1960 treatise On Thermonuclear War<\/i><\/a>. RAND Corporation theorist Kahn had argued that obedience to Reason requires accepting millions of deaths in a nuclear war waged to preserve American values.<\/p>\n

According to Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher, it is worth taking existential risks in order to achieve the supremacy of artificial intelligence:<\/p>\n

Machines will enlighten humans, expanding our reality in ways we did not expect or necessarily intend to provoke. In daily life, AI is our partner, helping us make decisions about what to eat, what to wear, what to believe, where to go, and how to get there. \u2026 [AI] weapons are targetable with relative precision, [obeying] moral and legal imperatives.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Counseling going to war with China, Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher claim that failing <\/i>to militarize artificial general intelligence (AGI) will wreck American society: \u201cThe dilemma posed by AI-related weapons technology is that keeping up research and development is essential for national survival.\u201d<\/p>\n

But, they caution, advanced AI must serve only certain corporations:<\/p>\n

Developing AGI will require immense computing power \u2026 created by only a few well-funded organizations. \u2026 Its applications will need to be restricted. Limitations could be imposed by only allowing approved organizations to operate it.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kissinger joined his ancestors in 2023, and in 2025, after Trump retook office, Schmidt teamed up with Alexandr Wang<\/a> (founder of the military AI company Scale AI, now charged with developing \u201csuperintelligence\u201d for Meta) and Dan Hendrycks<\/a>, executive director of the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit largely funded by Open Philanthropy.<\/p>\n

In March, Hendrycks, Schmidt, and Wang co-published a Strangelovian policy paper on national security, \u201cSuperintelligence Strategy<\/a>.\u201d The authors compare their version of deterring attacks from unfriendly AI-armed nations\u2014which they call \u201cMutual Assured AI Malfunction\u201d or MAIM\u2014to the classical Cold War deterrence theory of \u201cmutual assured destruction\u201d or MAD.<\/p>\n

But, rather than deterring military AI threats with a promise of retaliation after<\/i> an attack, as per standard MAD theory, MAIM advocates striking first, preventatively.<\/p>\n

Hendrycks, Schmidt, and Wang compare MAIM favorably to Kahn\u2019s \u201cthinking the unthinkable\u201d about the positive aspects of launching a preventative nuclear first strike on the Soviet Union, while preplanning to robustly rebuild American capitalism from the radioactive ashes after the hypothetically enfeebled Soviet retaliation.<\/p>\n

Echoing extreme \u201cAI doomer<\/a>\u201d worldviews, Hendrycks, Schmidt, and Wang encourage the US military to undertake preemptive cyber and \u201ckinetic\u201d sabotage campaigns to ruin the AI infrastructure of US competitors, including bombing data centers to prevent the emergence of non-US-aligned superintelligences.<\/p>\n

Afraid of US market competitors launching expensive Manhattan Project-style superintelligence efforts, they advocate for \u201cnonproliferation.\u201d By which they mean using military means to ensure that only the US, its allies, and certain corporate behemoths can create and use advanced AI technologies.<\/p>\n

In a major obfuscation, the trio\u2019s pro-AI acceleration paper does not acknowledge ongoing attempts to create international agencies capable of monitoring, regulating, and sanctioning the development and use of military AI, such as the Netherlands\u2019 Responsible AI in the Military Domain<\/a>, or international resolutions<\/a> by governments to regulate or ban<\/a> lethal AI weapons.<\/p>\n

Schmidt\u2019s SCSP vehemently opposes<\/a> significant governmental regulation of AI products and weapons. Schmidt prefers that the AI industry self-regulate, and his policy aligns with the vaguely stated regulatory aims<\/a> of Hendrycks\u2019s Center for AI Safety.<\/p>\n

In late October, leading computer scientists, world celebrities, and thousands of concerned professionals signed the Future of Life Institute\u2019s call<\/a> for prohibiting the further development of superintelligence until there is \u201cstrong public buy-in\u201d and \u201cbroad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably.\u201d Hendrycks signed the call; Wang and Schmidt did not.<\/p>\n

An April 2025 analysis<\/a> by AI Now concludes that, given the propensity of large language models to hallucinate and the impossibility of humans monitoring neural network decision-making processes, it is a national security error to allow commercial interests to dictate the reliability and safety of military AI. The failure to establish strong laws regulating artificial intelligence violates long-established legal and social norms governing the safety of nuclear power, nuclear arsenals, and chemical weapons. Loosely regulated AI systems are obviously more susceptible to hacking, sabotage<\/a>, and operational disaster than regulated systems, AI Now emphasizes.<\/p>\n

In 2025, SCSP released a series of Defense Papers<\/a> and Memos to the President, urging<\/a>, \u201cThe United States should organize \u2018moonshot\u2019 programs, modeled on past successful efforts like the Manhattan Project, to drive AGI [artificial general intelligence] innovation.\u201d Schmidt\u2019s clarion call is for the US to harm China.<\/p>\n

Schmidt\u2019s stance on military AI aligns closely with the Heritage Foundation\u2019s Project 2025<\/a>, the policy blueprint followed<\/a> by the Trump administration. Heritage paints a similarly paranoid view of China, while urging that government research and development of AI weaponry ought to be \u201ctransferred swiftly to American interests in the private sector,\u201d which includes, of course, Schmidt\u2019s ventures.<\/p>\n

Last year, the Tech Transparency Project uncovered<\/a> Schmidt\u2019s stakes in Chinese AI firms, \u201cEric Schmidt Cozies up to China\u2019s AI Industry While Warning U.S. of its Dangers.\u201d It appears that Schmidt lacks a coherent international relations strategy beyond enriching his globalized enterprises.<\/p>\n

Media conflicts of interest<\/b><\/p>\n

In June 2025, SCSP\u2019s AI+ Expo conference in Washington, DC, was sponsored<\/a> by military firms and \u201cmedia partners\u201d focused on ramping up<\/a> military AI spending<\/a> by the \u201cDepartment of War.\u201d Talks by Schmidt and panels featuring a Who\u2019s Who in governmental and corporate AI war planning were obsequiously \u201cmoderated<\/a>\u201d by national security beat reporters from the New York Times<\/i>, NBC News<\/i>, Politico<\/i>, Washington Post<\/i>, and C4ISRNET<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Code Pink energetically disrupted<\/a> Schmidt\u2019s presentation, which was hosted by former New York Times <\/i>Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker, who is now employed<\/a> by RAND Corporation. The activists unfurled Palestinian flags, demanding that Google cease providing technology<\/a> enabling genocide in Gaza. They were forcibly removed.<\/p>\n

David E. Sanger of the New York Times<\/i> supervised a panel<\/a> discussion featuring former Rep. Mac Thornberry, a board member of military AI corporations, including CAE<\/a> and Booz Allen<\/a>, where he sits alongside Mich\u00e8le Flournoy, his colleague<\/a> at Beltway lobby firm West Exec Advisors<\/a> and SCSP<\/a>. Sanger also ran a panel<\/a> featuring a Google vice president, Royal Hansen, and SCSP\u2019s Anne Neuberger, who had served on Biden\u2019s National Security Council, before joining SCSP and anti-AI regulation<\/a> leader, Andreessen Horowitz.<\/p>\n

SCSP videos record Sanger making statements disguised as questions about the threat of China to US global hegemony, and, therefore, the necessity for the US to quicken AI weapons contracting. Sanger did not ask the panelists about the validity of accepting those core elements of SCSP\u2019s lobbying agenda as factual or desirable.<\/p>\n

Hansen<\/a>, however, made a newsworthy statement:<\/p>\n

We have been using AI to defend Gmail long before people were using chatbots, and \u2026 it\u2019s only gotten better [with large language models]. \u2026 We use little agents, little classifiers, to look at all the content and metadata about a message to look for bad actors.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To reiterate: Hansen stated that Google uses Gemini to parse all the content<\/i> of Gmail looking for (undefined) \u201cbad actors,\u201d and the \u201creporter\u201d ignored it. (Google\u2019s press office did not respond to a request for comment.)<\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/i>\u2019s Ethical Handbook<\/a> cautions reporters that<\/p>\n

those assigned to beats, must be sensitive that personal relationships with news sources can erode into favoritism, in fact or appearance. \u2026 [S]ources are eager to win our good will for reasons of their own. \u2026 Staff members may not collaborate in ventures involving individuals or organizations that \ufb01gure or are likely to \ufb01gure in coverage they provide \u2026 While many professional and trade groups are organized as nonpro\ufb01ts, most of them do lobbying or advocacy work on policy issues [so] avoid situations that create an appearance of coziness or favoritism.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Sanger<\/a> is professionally affiliated with military-industry-focused organizations, including the Center for New American Security<\/a>, Harvard\u2019s Belfer Center<\/a>, the Council on Foreign Relations<\/a>, and the Aspen Institute<\/a>. In an email exchange<\/a> with Military AI Watch<\/i>, Sanger said his only recompense for hosting the SCSP panels was \u201ca somewhat soggy sandwich.\u201d He did not respond to our query about his possible conflicts of interest, including writing a Times<\/i> story<\/a> last year praising Google\u2019s much-criticized<\/a> Project Maven, while pumping Schmidt\u2019s White Stork<\/a> drone business in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Mick Sussman,<\/a> a New York Times<\/i> editor charged with investigating staff conflicts of interest, did not respond to Military AI Watch\u2019s<\/i> email query on Sanger\u2019s conflicts. Reached then on his cellphone, Sussman demanded to know how we got his phone number and abruptly hung up. Doggedly, we called back, and he picked up. Sussman said he had received the email and would get back to us. He didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Influence peddling and tax dodging<\/b><\/p>\n

Banking a net worth of $30 billion<\/a>\u2014more than doubled since 2020\u2014Schmidt uses a network of private nonprofits to reduce taxes and to social engineer his popular image. Advertising<\/a> himself as \u201cworking to restore a balanced relationship between people and the planet,\u201d Schmidt has disbursed billions of his tax-deductible dollars to hundreds of socially and environmentally progressive<\/a> nonprofits, including media organizations.<\/p>\n

To be clear: Schmidt\u2019s foundations earn hundreds of millions of dollars a year investing in environmentally and socially disastrous multinational corporations, venture capital partnerships, and private equity firms, some operating out of secretive tax havens in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands. Schmidt\u2019s nonprofits pay multimillion-dollar fees to Schmidt\u2019s personal investment firm, Hillspire LLC<\/a>, to manage portfolios of decidedly non-progressive investments.<\/p>\n

According to IRS filings in 2023, the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation<\/a> held $1.4 billion in assets and logged (largely untaxed) capital gains of $302 million. It distributed $301 million, mostly to scientific and university projects, including $15 million to SCSP. Its largest tax-free grant, $41 million, went to an AI software accelerator, Convergent Research<\/a>, which works on barcoding<\/a> brains.<\/p>\n

The Schmidt Family Foundation<\/a> held $1.8 billion in stocks and real estate, netting $198 million in profits. Its charitable contributions were $137 million, targeting Indigenous and alternative energy organizations\u2014causes antithetical to the sources of the money. The foundation holds $814 million in shares of climate- and information-destroying Alphabet (Google), and extensive holdings of Chinese AI companies.<\/p>\n

The family foundation invests heavily in environmentally destructive corporations, including Amazon, Apple, Oracle, Dow, Barrick Gold, and Rio Tinto. It profits from companies that fuel wars and genocides, such as Elbit Systems, General Dynamics, Huntington Ingalls Industries, L3Harris, Lockheed Martin, and Rheinmetall. It owns stock in Las Vegas casinos, greenhouse gas-generating chemical manufacturers, and oil-guzzling automakers. The nonprofit owns a piece of Murdoch\u2019s anti-environmentalist News Corp. And its 2018\u20132023 tax returns reveal cash donations of $9.75 million to Grist<\/i>, an \u201cindependent<\/a>\u201d environmental magazine that regularly climate-washes<\/i> Google<\/a> and Schmidt<\/a>. Grist\u2019s media department did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

PDF version available\u00a0here<\/a>. Audio version available\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

_______________________________________________________<\/p>\n

Go to Original – projectcensored.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

30 Oct 2025\u00a0–\u00a0In August, Foreign Affairs published Alphabet-Google billionaire Eric Schmidt\u2019s essay \u201cThe Dawn of Automated Warfare\u201d\u2014co-authored with Greg Grant of the Center for New American Security, a nonprofit funded by Schmidt and the military industry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":307545,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3078],"tags":[1733,1009,462,3114,3530,2462,3536,112,1365],"class_list":["post-307544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","tag-big-tech","tag-google","tag-militarism-and-ai","tag-military-capitalism","tag-military-industrial-media-complex","tag-military-industrial-technological-complex","tag-pentagon","tag-war-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307544","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307544"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307548,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307544\/revisions\/307548"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}