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Big Tech Takeover: Authoritarian Capture

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Palantir is the data backbone of the authoritarian state, and Anduril is its autonomous warfare command system, turning information dominance into automated military power.

Its Lattice platform connects satellite feeds, radar data and battlefield imagery into a single operational network, allowing military missions to be planned and executed at lightning speed. The company claims its systems can function at ‘level 5 autonomy’: launching, identifying targets, striking and returning without human intervention.

[Starshield, SpaceX’s of Elon Musk] When NATO’s battlefield communications depend on infrastructure controlled by one man who openly endorses European far-right parties, defence autonomy becomes theatrical fiction.

Other solutions such as GovCloud, from Amazon Web Services, or Azure Government, provided by Microsoft – in partnership with OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic – are now embedded in classified military and intelligence operations.

The ‘sovereignty’ these platforms promise actually means being insulated from public scrutiny and increasingly binding governments to private corporate infrastructures.

JD Vance, now vice-president, rose to power after Peter Thiel poured $15m into his 2022 campaign for election as US senator for Ohio – the largest single donation to an individual Senate race in American history.

Most striking is the Pentagon’s Detachment 201, created in June 2025 to encourage ‘innovation’, which includes four former tech executives from Palantir, Meta and OpenAI, elevated to the rank of lieutenant colonel. The distinction between contractor and commander, between profit-seeking and national defence, has been deliberately blurred.

When your customer cannot leave because you have become their operating system, you’ve transcended profit, you’ve achieved power.

In Italy, defence chiefs plan to entrust the management of their encrypted satellite communications to Musk’s Starlink. In Germany, the use of Palantir’s surveillance tools by police in a number of Länder triggered strong protests (and a complaint to the constitutional court), but the federal authorities are looking at the possibility of extending their use to the whole country.

The UK faces an even deeper trap. The National Health Service (NHS) processes tens of millions of patient records on Palantir’s £330m Federated Data Platform. In May the government had to pay KPMG £8m to promote adoption among resistant hospital trusts. The £1.5bn defence partnership signed in September, making Britain a hub for Palantir’s military AI systems, compounds the dependency.

These decisions have not triggered parliamentary debates worthy of the name.

What emerges is not traditional corporate capture but a fundamental transformation of sovereignty, from political authority exercised through relatively democratic institutions to technical capacity controlled through private ownership.

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