11.01.2026, Aleksandrovskoye.
The libertarian escape from the state has been replaced by the privatization of core state functions.
Not long ago, Silicon Valley tech magnates planned to escape the state and its taxes to corporate island-states in the ocean, a completely different process is now being observed. Spheres that have always been under state jurisdiction are passing under the control of apps and digital platforms owned by private foundations.
Rossa Primavera News Agency publishes a translation of an article by innovation specialist and advisor to the Spanish government on artificial intelligence, Francesca Bria (Rome), titled “The Techno-Authoritarian Coup: From Post-Democratic America to the Future of Europe,” published in the Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia on November 2, 2025.
At the end of July 2025, deep within the Pentagon’s bureaucratic apparatus, the US Army quietly relinquished a crucial part of its sovereignty. The awarding of the largest contract in history—$10 billion to Palantir Technologies—was described as an administrative procedure: one contract replaced 75 separate ones.
But behind the technocratic rhetoric lay something far more serious: Palantir’s software is set to become, by default, the operating system for combat intelligence, logistics, and personnel management systems. In reality, the contract optimization represented a strategic transfer of core military functions to a private firm whose founder, Peter Thiel, has openly stated that “freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.“
This transfer means that decisions about [military] objectives, troop movements, and intelligence are increasingly made by algorithms controlled not by military command, but by a board of directors accountable to shareholders. The army didn’t just buy software; it handed over operational sovereignty to a platform without which it can no longer function.
A new structure is forming in Washington, posing the most sophisticated challenge to democratic governance in the digital age: the authoritarian technological complex. It is faster, more ideological, and more privatized than any previous military-industrial model. Silicon Valley is no longer just creating apps: it is building empires.
Under the banner of patriotic technology, a coalition of corporations, sponsors, and ideologues is developing a planetary infrastructure of surveillance, coercion, and unaccountable management. This is not a metaphor. It is a multi-layered system—cloud platforms, artificial intelligence (AI) models, financial and drone networks, orbital systems—that forms an integrated techno-political control infrastructure, which I call the authoritarian reactor. At the top of this system are the most right-wing representatives of Silicon Valley: Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen (accelerationism ideologist), David Sacks (Trump’s special representative for cryptocurrency), Palmer Luckey (founder of Anduril Industries—a military technology company specializing in drones, linked to Peter Thiel’s network), Alex Karp (CEO of Palantir Technologies). Their investments align with a political project: transforming sovereignty into private assets.
Unlike traditional authoritarianism, which relies on mass mobilization and state violence, this system operates through technological infrastructure and financial coordination, making resistance not only difficult but architecturally obsolete.
By mid-2025, alarming signals began to appear in Europe. In Rome, Italy’s defense ministry agreed to integrate Elon Musk’s Starlink into military communications. In Berlin, companies Rheinmetall and Anduril formed a joint venture, expanding it by deploying swarms of autonomous drones for NATO. Palantir’s attempt to introduce its system into German police met strong resistance, but Bavaria signed new contracts with Palantir worth £25 million to spread the company’s system nationwide.
In London, the National Health Service (NHS) filled Palantir’s data platform (worth £330 million) with tens of millions of patient medical records from across the country. The UK signed a £1.5 billion agreement with Palantir, making itself a key hub for Palantir’s military AI.
None of these decisions were the subject of high-profile parliamentary debates; few made it to newspaper front pages. However, the totality of decisions shows a systematic transfer of European sovereignty to American technology companies connected to Silicon Valley’s most ideologically driven investors.
European governments are striving for strategic autonomy precisely at the moment when the continent’s critical infrastructures are being reconfigured to depend on American platforms whose leaders actively undermine European democracy.
This is a paradox with devastating consequences: the pursuit of independence is happening simultaneously with the loss of control with each signed contract.
Critical state infrastructures are being replaced and restructured in five strategic areas: population information, finance, defense, orbital communications, and energy. These are the very foundations of democratic control.
It all starts with control over the operating system. The army’s $10 billion contract made clear what insiders already suspected: Palantir has become the de facto operating system of the US government. Its traces lead to battlefield management, logistics, personnel management systems, and intelligence analysis.
Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) uses the Palantir Foundry platform to automate federal budgeting, determine eligibility for social assistance, reimburse healthcare costs, and manage veterans’ benefits. This platform was originally developed for counterinsurgency in Iraq, meaning these state tasks are carried out through algorithmic processes that mask purely political decisions.
Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller owns up to $250,000 worth of Palantir stock, despite the administration expanding Palantir’s role in immigration enforcement, including a 2025 contract with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for a new platform called ImmigrationOS, designed to track visa overstays and facilitate mass deportations.
If Palantir is the informational foundation of the authoritarian state, Anduril is its autonomous war management system. The Lattice platform integrates satellite data, radar data, and battlefield imagery into a single operational network that allows for automatic planning and execution of military operations. The company claims its systems can operate at Level 5 autonomy, meaning they can identify targets, engage, and return without human intervention.
In July 2025, US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced the “Advancing American Military Superiority with Drones” initiative, aiming for full integration of autonomous weapon systems by 2027. Anduril was founded by Palmer Luckey (creator of the Oculus VR headset) and Trae Stephens (partner at Founders Fund and former Palantir employee). Today, the company has military contracts worth over $22 billion. Its $30.5 billion valuation reflects not only commercial success but also growing control over foundational military infrastructure.
Starshield—SpaceX’s secretive military constellation—represents the privatization of low Earth orbit communications, previously the exclusive prerogative of the state. Although positioned as “sovereign infrastructure,” it is still owned and controlled by Musk’s private company. The Pentagon is exploring using Starship as a logistics platform capable of delivering troops and equipment anywhere on Earth in under an hour. When NATO’s frontline communications depend on infrastructure controlled by a man who openly supports European far-right parties, defense autonomy becomes theatrical scenery.
The General Matter uranium enrichment plant—the first private plant in the US, invested in by Founders Fund and run by former SpaceX engineers, with Thiel on its board of directors. The convergence is deliberate: Energy Secretary Chris Wright views advanced atomic technology not as a matter of energy independence, but of computational supremacy. “AI is an energy-intensive manufacturing industry,” he says. “The more energy you put in, the more intelligence you produce.“
The data centers powering Palantir’s analytics, Anduril’s autonomous systems, and AI algorithms require continuous, high-density energy that only advanced nuclear power can provide at scale. Private technology companies like AWS GovCloud and Microsoft Azure for Government—in partnership with OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic—are now integrated into secret military and intelligence operations. These platforms increasingly function as “sovereign” infrastructure, where sovereignty means the absence of public oversight and the binding of governments to private infrastructure.
To understand the speed of this process, we must trace individual pathways. There are no longer “revolving doors” between government and industry: the new power architecture welds them together.
J.D. Vance, now US Vice President, rose to power after Peter Thiel donated $15 million to his 2022 Senate campaign—the largest single donation in history for such a race. Thiel’s former chief of staff, Michael Kratsios, now heads the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Michael O’Badahl—head of Anduril and owner of $1 million worth of its stock—was appointed Assistant Secretary of the Army.
Gregory Barbaccia, after a decade in Palantir’s intelligence unit, now holds the position of Federal Chief Information Officer, overseeing data integration programs that directly benefit his former employer. Clarke Minor, recently appointed US Department of Health and Human Services CIO, previously held a senior position at Palantir, the very company that received nearly $300 million in contracts from that department between 2021 and 2024.
Most notable is the Pentagon’s Unit 201, which directly integrates Silicon Valley executives into the ranks of the US armed forces. In June 2025, the army appointed four tech company executives as lieutenant colonels: Palantir’s CTO Shyam Sankar, Meta’s CTO Andrew Bosworth, OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil, and former OpenAI Chief Scientist Bob McGrew. The distinctions between contractor and military command, between profit motive and national defense, have been deliberately erased!
Follow the money and see the pattern.
The case of the venture Founders Fund—Thiel’s flagship with $17 billion in assets—helps understand the architecture. In June 2025, Founders Fund became the lead investor in Anduril’s funding round, investing $1 billion and valuing the company at $30.5 billion. Founders Fund was the first institutional investor in Palantir and SpaceX and has quickly established itself as an investor in intelligence and orbital technology domains. But unlike traditional venture capital, it operates with direct strategic control.
Trae Stephens is simultaneously a partner at Founders Fund and chairman of Anduril. Delian Asparouhov splits his time between Founders Fund and chairing Varda Space Industries, which specializes in orbital manufacturing and future space infrastructure. Scott Nolan heads General Matter while maintaining his role at Founders Fund. This is not passive capital management but active stewardship of companies that are restructuring state capacity.
The American venture fund 1789 Capital exemplifies how venture capital becomes dynasty. Founded by trusted associates of Thiel and Vance, the fund transformed when Donald Trump Jr. joined as a partner in November 2024. Its assets grew from $150 million to over $1 billion. 1789 Capital positions itself as a source of “patriotic investment,” channeling over $50 million into Musk’s empire: into SpaceX for orbital dominance and xAI for developing military AI. 1789 Capital establishes a direct link between presidential power and defense industry profits.
Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) launched its “American Dynamism” fund—$600 million dedicated to defense tech and what the firm’s executives call “American nation-builders.” Marc Andreessen himself mobilized Silicon Valley’s billionaire elite to support Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, uniting venture capital, ideology, and state power in an unprecedented maneuver. Less-known players like venture firms 8VC and General Catalyst wield comparable influence. Joe Lonsdale, founder of 8VC and co-founder of Palantir, collaborated with Musk on a Political Action Committee (PAC) that helped secure Trump’s 2024 election victory. 8VC invested $450 million in Anduril, and General Catalyst invested $1.48 billion.
The results confirm the strategy’s effectiveness: Palantir became the most successful company in the S&P 500 in 2025. Palantir’s quarterly revenue exceeds $1 billion, thanks to a doubling in government contracts (53%).
When your customer cannot leave because you have become their operating system, you have acquired power.
At stake here is the existential fate not only of American democracy but of European sovereignty as a whole.
The German military is increasingly relying on Anduril’s autonomous systems through a partnership with Rheinmetall to create “European variants” of the Barracuda missile and Fury autonomous aircraft. Dependence on the US remains: European systems run on the Lattice platform, receive constant updates from servers in California, and operate within parameters defined in Silicon Valley.
German defense officials have proposed reducing dependence on external suppliers like Starlink and developing their own satellite systems. Meanwhile, Elon Musk has repeatedly publicly interfered in German politics: in January 2025, he live-streamed a conversation with Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader Alice Weidel to an audience of over 200,000, asserting that “only the AfD can save Germany,” even as the party is under scrutiny for extremist views.
The UK risks falling into an even deeper trap. The National Health Service runs on Palantir’s £330 million data platform, processing tens of millions of patient medical records. A £1.5 billion defense alliance, turning the UK into a hub for Palantir’s military AI systems, deepens this dependency further.
Each new contract expands this trap. When Palantir becomes an indispensable tool for state operations, when NATO adopts Anduril’s drones as a standard, when nuclear facilities power the AI systems that run everything else, change becomes irreversible.
What emerges is not traditional business operations but a fundamental transformation of sovereignty: from political power exercised through democratic institutions to technical control exercised by private parties. While Brussels discusses “digital sovereignty,” European ministries sign contracts that hand over core state functions to this authoritarian structure. Each new dependency limits future political autonomy, embedding anti-democratic logic into the government’s infrastructure.
The political transformation of Silicon Valley in the era of Trump 2.0 consolidates what Evgeny Morozov (Belarusian-American political scientist) calls “intellectual oligarchs“: venture capitalists who act as organic intellectuals of 21st-century capital. They not only theorize but also preach new forms of sovereignty.
Unlike Gramsci’s industrial-era intellectuals, who provided adherence to existing structures, these new figures spread their ideas through venture funding, fellowships, and appointing like-minded individuals to strategic positions, creating post-democratic governance through technological infrastructure that renders traditional oversight obsolete.
What began as a libertarian evasion of the state has turned into its authoritarian appropriation. The same group that once championed seasteading and cryptocurrency to escape state power now places its members at the highest levels of that power. Failing to build parallel infrastructures, these actors found it more effective to become the state infrastructure themselves.
The most striking example comes from finance. Their strategy in the cryptocurrency world was always to go against the grain: buy Bitcoin when no one else was, sell at the peak, and buy back after the crash. Now they have applied the same timing to politics: supporting the state when Silicon Valley preached escaping it, and promoting conservative nationalism when the tech elite still praised globalism.
Now, under “Trump’s Law,” stablecoins are classified as “national security infrastructure,” granting issuers a quasi-central bank status. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claims they could create up to $2 trillion in new demand for US Treasury bonds: a private money system supporting the state deficit.
To wield power, it is not enough to win elections: one must win contracts. Each procurement cycle shrinks democratic choice until choice itself is technically bounded by infrastructure built to serve investors, not citizens.
The techno-authoritarians know this. That’s why they moved from doubting democracy to building its replacement. They do not need to convince voters, but rather to control the most critical state infrastructure.
Democracy persists as a legacy interface, maintained only for stability’s sake, while being systematically hollowed out and replaced.
The authoritarian technology companies of Silicon Valley are not theorizing about this world: they are already building it.
Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency
