In late July 2025, deep within the Pentagon’s bureaucratic machinery, the US Army quietly signed away a critical piece of its sovereignty. A $10bn contract with Palantir Technologies – one of the largest in the Department of Defense’s history – consolidated 75 separate procurement agreements into a single package. What looked like bureaucratic streamlining was in reality a strategic handover of core military functions to a private company whose founder, Peter Thiel, has openly declared that freedom and democracy are no longer compatible.

This handover means that targeting decisions, troop movements and intelligence analysis increasingly flow through algorithms governed not by military command but by a corporate board answerable to shareholders. The army wasn’t just buying software, it was ceding operational sovereignty to a platform it can no longer function without.

Beyond Palantir, under the banner of ‘patriotic tech’, a coalition of firms, funders and ideologues is engineering a planetary infrastructure for techno-political control. It’s a stacked system – cloud platforms, AI models, financial rails, drone networks, orbital systems – forming what I call the ‘Authoritarian Stack’. Where traditional authoritarianism relies on mass mobilisation and state violence, this system operates through technological infrastructure and financial coordination, making classic resistance appear not just difficult but obsolete. At its helm stand Silicon Valley’s most rightwing figures – Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Palmer Luckey and Alexander Karp – whose investments align with a political project: the remaking of sovereignty as a private asset class. <exergue|texte=The $10bn US army consolidation confirmed what insiders already knew: Palantir has become the de facto operating system of the US government. It’s the universal data platform underpinning battlefield management, supply chain logistics, personnel systems and (…)

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(2) This piece launches a new project and data-driven investigation into the inner workings of the American Tech Right: authoritarian-stack.info/.

(6) Shyam Sankar, Palantir’s chief technology officer; Andrew Bosworth, his counterpart at Meta; Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer; and Robert McGrew, former OpenAI research chief. See Ashley Roque, ‘Palantir, Meta, OpenAI execs to commission into army reserve, from “Detachment 201” ’, London 13 June 2025, breakingdefense.com/.

(7) Alexandra Ulmer and Joseph Tanfani, ‘Trump-linked venture fund 1789 Capital tops $1 billion in assets’, 8 September 2025, www.reuters.com/.