There Is About to Be A Lethal Weapons Boom in Silicon Valley

There is about to be an absolute explosion of tech startups making lethal weapons. 

Lost in the AI hype, is a massive weapons build-out supervised by a16z and Founder’s Fund and led by Anduril. They are making a massive play not just to compete with, but to REPLACE existing defense contractors into a sea-change in military strategy towards autonomous systems, AI, drones and satellite surveillance. 

There has been a lot of work put into what we are going to see unfold in the next 18 months in this space. They have laid a massive amount of groundwork for this. And as the tech bubble truly begins, they are ready to cover it in gasoline and set it on fire. 

When a16z funded Palmer Luckey in 2017 in the development of Anduril, that is where their stake in weapons and war really took off from my view. Six years ago, and in those six years Anduril has executed phenomenally, operating live in conflict regions in a very short timeframe, and delivering both very complex software and hardware that is extremely difficult to produce, into production with some of the most rigorous customers in the world: war criminals. The relationship to the CIA remains strong and Anduril has really been holding it down at the Pentagon and getting alignment with venture capital in a new age of much closer and lucrative collaboration. And a16z and InQTel have been in a number of deals together over this critical period. 

Other a16z weapons startups — including AI for drone swarms and battlefield surveillance, and weapons manufacturing facilities — were also funded in or around this same period. This was the development of broad based, strategic foray into drone systems and other military-adjacent technologies; Palantir in many ways was the first mover in the era of new warfaree and that is actually a very mature company at this point, founded nearly 20 years ago. 

But for our immediate purposes, Anduril, founded in 2017, is a better liminal point. Leading up to that point we have Shift, recruiting military members into the tech industry in 2013, Skydio founded in 2014, ShieldAI founded in 2015. Toka, 2018, a “cyber defenses company”; Hadrian, for weapons manufacturing at the factory level, founded in 2020. There are others but the picture I am trying to paint starts in about 2015 when we were the middle of the bubble and ramps up as we get to the latter part of the bubble. Anduril was an absolutely massive investment for them on multiple dimensions and anchors these developments.  

Fast forward to today and these “field clearing” companies are in production, are scaling up, have solid revenue, are very much active in conflict zones, have raised more money, and are looking all-systems green at this point. Having these early successes in the hand is a great platform as we move into another stage: lots of new activity out of the existing players as things ramp up, new companies starting, new funding rounds announced, increases in LP investment in the category, new massive military contracts, etc. 

Over the past 18 months, a16z has made an extremely slimy and cowardly move of trying to manufacture a “grassroots”, populist culture op to encapsulate the weapons building and fold it into right-wing packages. As always, blood for imperial war must be packaged and disguised, under space programs, under FUD, under marketing campaigns and slogans. A16z’s is “American Dynamism”. This is a proposed movement, they even call it a “philosophy”, pitching a broad modernization of American infrastructure, the patriotic dedication to American greatness, “rebuilding” the country, even about jobs, etc. This is where a whole host of weapons companies is hiding. After all, we must defend the homeland from the Communists!! 

Again. 

Love to see the innovative thinking here.

While a16z has taken the publicity part of this, Founder’s Fund has been equally active in coming up with the market strategy — the leader of the American Dynamism practice at a16z started out as Founder’s Fund. These are extremely porous entities and they move people around quite a bit for various strategic reasons, such as seeding a new weapons projects, bringing over institutional knowledge, for PR/marketing reasons, and initiation in the conspiracy as a player. 

This is not like they are just funding a couple startups in this space to keep the portfolio diversified. This is a comprehensive effort and it spans multiple VC firms. A number of other weapons companies are hiding in Founder’s Fund, InQTel (the CIA’s VC firm), Lux Capital, and related conspirators, where they have been aggressively executing on startups that, in totality, present the new model of warfare; where weapons development is done in venture capital and not in the “legacy” defense contractors. Though obnoxious, the use of the American Dynamism tagline has allowed us to track the spread of the message as it was artificially spread from VC circles into Republican campaign platforms, economic think tanks, Wall Street Journal editorials, and into other venture capitalists and financial actors. A lot of work is being put into circulating this and a16z has hosted both an American Dynamism conference and a number of American Dynamism meetups. We even had a book come out from Anduril about its strategy as part of the overall marketing festivities. 

Importantly, a16z has also been recruiting other venture capitalists into this market. Most recently, they have openly called for other VCs to invest in the space in a Wall Street Journal article that was clearly purchased and repeated word for word talking points right from a16z marketing material. They are orbited by a few smaller firms like Lux Capital, that are also aggressive on the militarization. 

Essentially, they now have a bunch of shit in place. The conditions for the bubble are rife. They have boned up their relationships with the military. They have raised funds for this specific vertical. They have effectively marketed it within a number of conservative and Republican circles. They have spokespeople, a marketing plan, they have prepared the market, they have LPs lined up, they have institutional buy-in, they have bank support, they have readied their existing players, they have brought in extensive military talent from the public sector, they have taken an attack formation. 

Now all that has to happen is to light this bitch upppppppp. 

By blasting the shit out of this thing with money now that the web 3.0 bubble is truly on. 

To whit, the American Dynamism practice at a16z just announced a new $500 million round last month, which means they are getting ready to start passing out tens of millions of dollars to new and young startups in this space. The cost to entry in this space is higher than a traditional software startup so there’s another factor in place. Palantir recently announced a $436 million huge AI contract with special forces also indicating large contract deals happening. They have done all of this with very little public resistance and their activities and contracts as a result have been more public and open; something we should expect to see going forward. The era of covert military collaboration has ended as VCs vie for a strategic position at the very forefront of war architecture.  

So, we’re pretty much at a critical mass for the weapons bubble to kick off. I would expect to see a ton of new weapons startups, an overt shift in the industry towards militarization, lots of new contracts with the military and intelligence agencies from existing startups, more participation by venture capital in the election cycle coming up, and a marketing and PR blitz at every relevant level. And that is everything from continuing to evangelize this investment category to LPs, to lobbying in Congress to promote an enhanced military budget for this “modernization”. And so it will go. 

I don’t think this is going to be a quiet affair. With Coinbase fighting openly with the establishment in the market, we are seeing a new age of boldness around the topic of war in technology and significant efforts are being made from hacker schools to colleges to meetups and conferences and podcasts and lectures, to normalize this as one of the top mandates in our field: to deliver a new kind of war. Last year, Girls Who Code, a tech program for young girls, was openly sponsored by Raytheon. They serve girls as young as middle-school aged. So this is being done at every level of the stack. 

Considering we are dealing with accelerationalists — something Marc Andreessen has in his Twitter bio — sometimes I wonder if this is just some destination-less play at the very limits of cynicism. Military and war are massive accelerants of technology. If you are out hunting on the reaches of human technical achievement, if you are searching specifically for discontinuous innovation, war is a great incubator for that. Do they want to use a blood machine as an incubator for their technology, knowing that war produces an orgy of money, urgency, alignment, nation-state level backing, coordination of resources and talent, and existential threat needed to push them to a yet unknown destination? 

Do they even know what they are truly looking for? 

I actually don’t think it’s crazy to believe that this is as much of a motivator as any other. This is in fact the CIA’s rationale for operating in Silicon Valley as a venture capital practice, InQTel: that the consumer market accelerates military development, and that by marrying the two you can get some pretty impressive leaps forward. In the technology industry we study these phenomenons closely and discuss them often, because they have been a fulcrum of technology development forever. And specifically, discontinuous innovation that puts us up a few rungs in some non-specified, arbitrary ladder that doesn’t materially exist, yet is presented as inevitable and fixed. Things like the atomic bomb, which was discontinuous because it fundamentally changed the context of nation-state level diplomacy as well as the level of lethality that could be reached. Destroyer of worlds. 

Perhaps the venture capitalists have decided that maybe a better focus, than growing up a technology tediously through peace-time, is to put the technology at the center of the colonial and imperial empire and letting the unknowable yet utterly predictable pressures of history form a crucible with which to allow the natural powers and elements and, specifically, the inevitable results of capitalism, to do what they do; to let war in in order that the machines may grow, to sit on their asses as the blood flows and the technology machine develops.

If you are an accelerationist, you are going to be look at WHAT causes and escalates acceleration. What conditions, where in history, where else do we see this, what forces have acted on rapid technological development and discontinuous innovation? 

How…. can we replicate those conditions? 

War. 

That is exactly what I would do if I thought accelerationism was the right way to approach life and the organization of nations and the destiny of humanity. If I believed in accelerationism as some type of higher power whose pursuit forgives the necks you crush to ride the red horse. If you think of them as a cult of sorts, they are following this unknowable curve of history — and thus they can position it as inevitable as it peaks over the horizon — they totally give slack to any resistance and simply allow the “fates” (of their war making) to operate on a test bed they lovingly and carefully tended for this purpose: money. 

Indeed, the weapons development initiative is happening, I would argue, with the space aspect as PART of the weapons development initiative. And that the correct superset for these technologies, meaning *encompassing* of SpaceX and other space initiatives, is the military frontier. Anduril is already strategizing an age of space war where space becomes yet another site of war and battle can move in between the two “planes” of existence with ease and at will. They are already planning, in detail, for space war and are building weapons for it, that is correct. 

Accelerationism. Very dangerous stuff in the hands of fascists.

These assholes are gonna have us going in and out of blackholes with web 134 nuclear bombs and annihilating entire planets from a floating fascist palace in space, in no fucking time, all their conquests locked into a mind prison to mine cryptocurrency to trade for compute as the development of machine conciousness is prioritized over human life, by literal sociopaths who feel nothing for the human race except contempt and disgust.

American Dynamism.

I hope at least that the proceedings may be impressionable enough to the mainstream to warrant a renewed anti-war effort. What this, extremely small number of people, are deciding to do with the future of technology represents an incredibly dangerous and aggressive new picture of war and what resistance truly entails. Our best hope is that we can summon enough from a broken left to meet this moment. This is not inevitable unless we let them. Ultimately, WE are the ones who confer inevitability on them. That must be withdrawn.