Silicon Valley’s militarization is in many ways a return to the region’s roots.

Before the area was a tech epicenter, it was a bucolic land of fruit orchards. In the 1950s, the Defense Department began investing in tech companies in the region, aiming to compete with Russia’s technological advantages in the Cold War. That made the federal government the first major backer of Silicon Valley.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a division of the Department of Defense, later incubated technology – such as the internet – that became the basis for Silicon Valley’s largest companies. In 1998, the Stanford graduate student Sergey Brin and Larry Page received funding form Darpa and other government agencies to create Goole.

But in the late 1990s and 2000s, tech companies turned toward consumer technology such as e-commerce and social networks. They presented themselves as doing good and democratizing technology for the masses, drawing a largely liberal work force that was opposed to working with the defense establishment.

In 2008, more than 4,000 Goole employees protested a Pentagon contract called Project Maven, which would have used the company’s A.I. to analyze drone surveillance footage. In a letter to executives, the employees said Goole “should not be in the business for war.”

Google soon said it would not renew the Pentagon contract and dropped out of a race for a $10 billion cloud computing contract called JEDI for the Department of Defense.

That year, Goole published guiding principles for future A.I. projects, forbidding A.I. for “weapons for other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people.” Other companies followed with similar pledges.

There were outliers. Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir a tech data analytics firm founded in 2003, was so enthusiastic for Silicon Valley to take a bigger role in defense that he sued the Army in 2016 to force it to consider Palantir’s software. Palantir claimed the Army was failing to look at commercial options for its needs.

Palantir won the suit. Other tech companies provided the Defense Department with software and cloud computing, among other services.

In 2015, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter visited Silicon Valley to open the Defense Innovation Unit, a flagship military program to speed the adoption of advanced technology. But start-ups said the buraucratic process for signing deals with the Pentagon made the program untenable.

2024.08.04 New York Times