NEW Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse just dropped: According to the Financial Timesmajor defense technology companies Palantir and Palmer Luckey’s Anduril is in talks with SpaceX and OpenAI (among other tech players) to form a consortium to bid for US government defense contracts.

The purpose of the group, which reportedly plans to announce its membership as soon as January, is to harass “prime” contractors who have a habit of scoring major Pentagon deals. In the consortium’s crosshairs, there are Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing.

There is little question that legacy brands bid well in defense work. According to Department of Defense Fiscal Year 2023 ReviewLockheed Martin brought in $61.4 billion, RTX (née Raytheon) scored $24.1 billion, and Boeing earned a cool $20.1 billion. In 2021, 71% of all Lockheed Martin’s revenue from US government contracts. Just under 50% of all annual sales for Boeing and RTX went to the feds during the same time period. As The American Prospect previously pointed out, it is state-funded companies but the government has no real control over operations or leadership.

So will the safety and security of the country improve by breaking the vice of the big three in the Pentagon? Perhaps, under the assumption that the production of weapons of war and providing them to allies for conflicts that range from mere to genocidal is a net positive for national security, that, let’s call that suspicious.

but IT particular collection of tech firms as a hammer to bash the oligopoly? It is not clear that this is an improvement on the status quo.

Palantir has carved itself a niche as the Defense Department’s go-to for AI systems. Just this year, it suddenly became a $100 million contract to build military AI-powered targeting tools and $480 million to expand the Pentagon’s data analysis and decision-making tools. The company is more than happy to lend its technology to programs that are at best ethically questionable, including being the technological backbone of the Trump administration’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement, helping to guide the disintegration of migrant families and facilitating mass raids which led to the separation of children and parents. The company Technology has also been at the center of Israel’s ongoing attacks in Gaza with killed more than 45,000 people.

Anduril, called “the most controversial tech startup” by Bloomberg, building sensor towers for use on the US-Mexico border to track migrants and have exploring the development of autonomous weapons. The company’s big game is build drones for warbut it also has its eyes building surveillance satellitesall of which brings up some serious ethical questions attached.

OpenAI recently announced a partnership with Anduril to work on anti-drone systembut it looks like that will be the first of many collaborations when the consortium comes together. The agreement, which caused some unrest among OpenAI employees who does not particularly want to participate in doing defense work, comes after OpenAI quietly removed the language from its usage policy preventing the use of its technology for military purposes and warfare.

And on top of all that, This is Peter Thiel all the way down, baby. Thiel, the techno-libertarian lizard man who has never been so quiet trying to put his colleagues in as many branches of government as possible, has his hands in basically all of these companies. He founded Palantir, co-founded OpenAI, put major financial backing behind Anduril, and is an early-stage investor in SpaceX. He has proven himself to be a less cautious person with an ideology to work with very far summed up as “technological progress regardless of the human cost.” Thiel’s biographer, Max Chafkin, told Time that Thiel should be feared, saying, “When you combine a hatred of democracy and institutional values ​​with the bankroll of a billionaire you can be disastrous.”

Suddenly, perhaps the malignant but status quo evil of old-school defense contractors doesn’t seem so bad.