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Pentagon strikes deals with top AI companies

Anthropic, which the US Department of War designated a “supply-chain risk” earlier this year, was not part of the agreement

2 May, 2026, https://www.rt.com/news/639359-pentagon-ai-spacex-anthropic/

The Pentagon has said that it has reached deals with major artificial intelligence firms to integrate their advanced AI capabilities into the agency’s classified networks.

The US Department of War has been actively negotiating with the industry’s leaders since the start of the year as it is trying to expand the application of AI in military operations and diversify the range of companies that provide the technology.

It is going ahead with the push despite concerns among experts regarding the ability of the AI to reliably operate within the existing laws of war and its possible use to invade the privacy of civilians in peacetime.

Agreements have been struck with SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services and Oracle to deploy their AI systems for “lawful operational use,” the Pentagon said in a statement on Friday.

Artificial intelligence will be integrated into the Department of War’s Impact Level 6 and Impact Level 7 networks to “streamline data synthesis, elevate situational understanding, and augment warfighter decision-making in complex operational environments,” the statement read.

The US Department of War’s official AI platform, GenAI.mil, has been used by over 1.3 million personnel in the last five months, “generating tens of millions of prompts and deploying hundreds of thousands of agents,” it said. According to the Pentagon, the technology has allowed the execution of certain tasks to be sped up “from months to days.”

Separately, the US Navy has awarded San Francisco-based AI company Domino Data Lab a $100 million contract to aid in combating Iranian mines in the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively blocked since the early days of the US-Israeli war on Iran.

“The Navy is paying for the platform that lets it train, govern, and field that AI at a speed required for contested waters,” Domino CEO Thomas Robinson told Reuters in an interview on Friday. Washington is betting on the speed of AI in analyzing a wealth of data from multiple sensor types to rapidly improve mine detection in US underwater drones, the outlet said.

The Pentagon’s recent deals with AI companies conspicuously excluded Anthropic, which had a falling out with the Pentagon earlier this year after it refused to loosen safeguards for its technology. The company argued that its AI could be used for domestic surveillance or the deployment of automatic weapons without human oversight.

The Department of War responded by designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk,” a rare label typically reserved for entities linked to Washington’s foreign adversaries, effectively sidelining the firm from any future contracts.

US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth branded Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei an “ideological lunatic” during a US Senate hearing earlier this week. Hegseth compared the company’s reluctance to agree to Pentagon’s terms to “Boeing giving us airplanes and telling us who we can shoot at.”

Anthropic is currently challenging the Pentagon in court to have the “supply-chain risk” label dropped.

May 6, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Oil, Empire, and the Price of War: How Energy Became the Ultimate Weapon

May 2, 2026 , Joshua Scheer, https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/02/oil-empire-and-the-price-of-war-how-energy-became-the-ultimate-weapon/

This war isn’t just being fought with missiles—it’s being waged through oil markets, currencies, and corporate balance sheets. And while the world watches bombs fall, something quieter—and far more consequential—is happening: a global energy system is being weaponized in real time.

This on The Geopolitical Economy Report with Ben Norton. Ben digs into the role oil plays at the center of the war on Iran—and how the United States turned itself into the world’s top oil producer to weaponize that power globally. He breaks down the push to sideline OPEC, the UAE’s dramatic exit, and the political fiction of American “energy independence.”

Oil Was Never Just Fuel — It Was Always the Weapon

One of the clearest lessons of the war on Iran isn’t merely military. It’s structural. Oil is not just a commodity. It is power. It is leverage. It is the bloodstream of the global economy—and increasingly, the preferred instrument of empire.

For decades, the global system has revolved around the petrodollar, a quiet but foundational arrangement ensuring that most of the world’s oil is bought and sold in U.S. dollars. Even today, an estimated 80% of global oil transactions still run through that system. But the architecture is showing cracks. Sanctioned nations such as Russia, Iran, and Venezuela have begun trading outside the dollar, challenging the financial scaffolding that has long underpinned U.S. dominance.

Yet the story is not simply one of decline. Because while the dollar faces pressure, the United States has quietly secured something arguably more consequential: control over production itself.

In just over a decade, the U.S. transformed from a major importer into the largest oil producer on Earth, responsible for roughly 14–15% of global output. The shale boom didn’t just reshape domestic energy markets—it rewired the geopolitical landscape. Washington no longer merely polices the system; it helps shape it directly. And in wartime, that shift becomes decisive.

Crisis for the World, Windfall for Big Oil

As the conflict with Iran escalated, global oil prices surged—nearly doubling in 2026. For billions of people, that spike translates into inflation, food insecurity, and economic instability. For poorer nations, it is nothing short of devastating.

But for U.S. and Western oil corporations, the crisis has been a windfall. Profits have soared, with some companies reporting earnings double those of the previous year. As supply chains fracture and traditional exporters are destabilized or cut off, American firms have stepped in—expanding exports to Europe and Asia and filling the void left by war.

The pattern is unmistakable: global pain, concentrated gain.

The Strait That Can Shake the World

At the center of this crisis sits one of the most strategically vital chokepoints on Earth: the Strait of Hormuz. Before the war, roughly 20% of the world’s traded oil passed through this narrow corridor each day. When Iran moved to disrupt it, the message was not subtle—it was existential.

Shut the strait, and the global economy trembles.

This is what modern warfare looks like: not just territory and airspace, but shipping lanes, pipelines, and market flows. Control the flow of oil, and you control the tempo of the world economy.

Breaking OPEC, Rewriting Power

Another quiet earthquake has reshaped the landscape: the United Arab Emirates’ withdrawal from OPEC. On paper, it looks bureaucratic. But historically, OPEC represented something radical—a collective attempt by Global South nations to control their own resources and wrest power from Western oil giants.

Weakening OPEC weakens that collective leverage. And it strengthens something else.

Washington has never opposed cartels in principle—it has opposed cartels it doesn’t control. The long‑term objective has been consistent: ensure that corporations aligned with U.S. power, not sovereign states, set the terms of the global energy market.

The Myth of “Energy Independence”

The familiar talking point insists that the U.S. is “energy independent,” insulated from global chaos. It isn’t.

Oil is priced globally. When prices spike, everyone pays—regardless of where the oil originates. The U.S. still imports millions of barrels per day, and its infrastructure depends on specific grades of crude it does not produce in sufficient quantities. “Independence” is political messaging, not economic reality.

From Oil Shock to Food Crisis

And here is where the crisis becomes catastrophic. Oil is not just fuel—it is fertilizer, transport, and the backbone of modern agriculture. As energy prices surge and supply chains fracture, farmers worldwide are already facing shortages.

The likely result is grimly predictable: rising food prices, shrinking harvests, and widespread hunger. This is not speculation. It is the logical downstream effect of an energy shock of this scale.

The Real Takeaway

This war is not contained. It is not regional. It is not temporary. It is systemic.

It is reshaping how power works—who controls energy, who sets prices, and who pays the cost. And as always, the burden falls downward: onto workers, onto poorer nations, onto the global majority.

Meanwhile, at the top, the machinery hums. Profits rise. Influence expands. The line between state policy and corporate interest blurs even further.

Oil was never just fuel. It was always the weapon. And now, it is being used exactly as intended.

May 5, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Why Expanded Plutonium Pit Production is Wrong.

30 April 26, https://nukewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Primer-Pit-Production-is-Wrong.pdf

The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is aggressively expanding the production of plutonium pits, the radioactive cores or “triggers” of nuclear weapons. Their production has been the choke point of resumed industrial-scale U.S. nuclear weapons production ever since a 1989 FBI raid investigating environmental crimes shut down the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver.

In 1996 production was transferred back to the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico, but capped at no more than 20 pits per year. In 2018 NNSA declared it would produce at least 30 pits per year at LANL and 50 per year at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. NNSA now plans to produce up to 205 pits every year for the new arms race.

May 3, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Reining In The Pentagon – Can the Military-Industrial Beast Be Tamed?

On the campaign trail in 2024, Donald Trump pledged to drive the “war profiteers” and “war mongers” from Washington, suggesting that they like wars because “missiles cost $2 million each,” while bragging that, in his first term in office, “I had no wars.”

the Golden Dome concept is so delusional that it barely merits a detailed critique

Another reason AI-driven weapons may not be as cheap as advertised is that Luckey, Thiel, and their merry band of unhinged techno-optimists want to eliminate virtually any oversight of their activities.

we really don’t need ever more new weaponry that kills even faster. We need to stop the killing

William D. Hartung, SCHEERPOST, April 28, 2026

Right at this moment, we are witnessing an unprecedented shift of resources from domestic investments in the United States to the military-industrial complex (aka the war machine). The only comparable period in our history was the buildup to World War II, when the United States confronted a powerful adversary in Nazi Germany with designs to control not just Europe, but the world. The current buildup is breathtaking in scope and will certainly prove devastating in its impact — not just on this country’s foreign and domestic policies but also on the economic prospects of average Americans.

When, in 2023, my colleague Ben Freeman and I first conceived of our book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, we viewed it in part as a cautionary tale about just how high the Pentagon budget might rise in the years to come (absent pushback from Congress and the taxpaying public). By the time our book came out in November 2025, however, the Pentagon budget had already topped the $1 trillion mark and, only recently, President Trump has proposed to instantly add another $500 billion to that already staggering figure and to do so in a single year’s time. And imagine this: such a proposed increase alone is higher than the total military budget of any other nation on Earth. Mind you, the current high levels of spending have already underwritten a provocative, unnecessary intervention in Venezuela and a region-wide war in the Middle East, and the larger costs of all this in human lives and damage to the global economy are guaranteed to shape the lives of the rest of us globally for years to come.

To add insult to injury, the Pentagon announced that it would seek a $200 billion supplemental appropriation to pay for its war on Iran, which has spread across the Middle East. That $200 billion would have been in addition to the $1.5 billion proposed for the Pentagon’s future budget. According to an analysis by Pentagon budget expert Stephen Semler, the Iran war, which started on February 28th with Israeli and U.S. air strikes on that country, cost the United States more than $28 billion just in its first two weeks. And to put that in perspective, $28 billion is more than three times the Trump administration’s proposed annual budgets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency (at a time when the climate crisis and the need to head off future pandemics are essential to the health and security of all Americans). Worse yet, it’s all for a completely senseless war that should never have been started.

As President Trump alternates between engaging in negotiations to end the war and threatening to wipe Iran off the map — or even just walking away to bomb another day — there are reports that the supplemental budget request to pay for the war on Iran will shrink from the proposed $200 billion to $98 billion. And that $98 billion will include other things in addition to war costs, including disaster relief and aviation modernization.

The Garrison State and the Reign of the War Profiteers

On the campaign trail in 2024, Donald Trump pledged to drive the “war profiteers” and “war mongers” from Washington, suggesting that they like wars because “missiles cost $2 million each,” while bragging that, in his first term in office, “I had no wars.”

And his rhetoric as the ultimate champion of peace has continued during his second term, even as he has indeed launched reckless wars guaranteed to fill the coffers of the “war profiteers” he railed against on the campaign trail. He has, however, also pledged to help the weapons industry quadruple production of the same sort of “$2 million bombs” he decried during the campaign, plus — even better for the arms makers — missile interceptors that cost up to $12 million each. Worse yet, the demands of the current war on Iran, coupled with support for Israel’s war on Gaza and Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself from Russia, have left the Pentagon and the giant weapons corporations complaining that, if the U.S. doesn’t radically increase its production of artillery shells, bombs, and missiles, the cupboard could soon be bare.

Of course, filling that cupboard again to the tune of staggering sums of money is exactly the wrong solution. The answer to the current munitions shortage is not to further supersize this country’s arms manufacturing base, but to refrain from supplying the weapons used by Israel to commit genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, or to fuel unjustified wars like the current conflict with Iran. The best policy to prevent such stocks of military equipment from running low would, of course, be a more discriminating approach to military aid and a more restrained approach to U.S. foreign policy and war-making (writ large).

Washington should, in fact, put diplomacy first and only engage in military action if there is a genuine threat to the United States itself. We need a smarter policy toward military procurement and military strategy, not the garrison state with its “military-industrial complex” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than six decades ago.

In addition, of course, the Pentagon needs to shift its procurement strategy toward producing more reliable weapons at a more reasonable cost, while avoiding unnecessary complexity so that they can be made more rapidly and spend more time ready to be used and less time down for maintenance. Such a formula was a watchword of the bipartisan congressional military reform caucus of the 1980s, which at one point included more than 100 members of Congress and helped roll back the extremes of the military buildup launched by President Ronald Reagan.

The Diminishing Economic Returns of Pentagon Spending

In a detailed forthcoming study for the Transition Security Project and in her own writings, investigative journalist Taylor Barnes of Inkstick Media has charted the diminishing returns from Pentagon spending. Despite a soaring Pentagon budget, direct jobs in arms production are now one-third of what they were 30 years ago, down from three million then to 1.1 million now, according to the arms industry’s own trade association. Unionization rates in the arms production sector are also down sharply, with some big weapons firms like Northrop Grumman having unionization rates of less than 10%. In keeping with that trend, Lockheed Martin moved the production of its F-16 fighter — a staple of foreign arms exports — to the anti-union state of South Carolina.

Even worse, many states provide special tax breaks and other subsidies to attract or keep weapons factories — and that’s on top of the hundreds of billions the industry receives in federal tax dollars. In Utah, the state government staunchly refused to reveal how many jobs Northrop Grumman had promised in return for state subsidies, with one official claiming it would “compromise” the interests of the company to do so. Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman’s work on the Sentinel, the newest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), has been a poster child for dysfunctional weapons development, with the estimated cost of the program as a whole growing by 81% in just a few years. Part of the problem was that Northrop Grumman somehow managed to ignore the fact that its new missile would be too large to fit in existing silos, creating the need for further costly new construction efforts.

The spending of scarce tax revenues goes to ICBMs that former Secretary of Defense William Perry once labeled “one of the most dangerous weapons we have.” After all, a president might literally have only minutes to decide whether to launch them on being warned of a potential enemy attack, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war prompted by a false alarm. And there have been many false alarms and nuclear accidents in the nuclear age (even if not yet an actual nuclear attack loosed on the world), as meticulously documented in Eric Schlosser’s essential book Command and Control.

Then there’s the Golden Dome missile “defense” system, a fantasy of President Trump’s that, in reality, could never provide the promised “leakproof” protection against weaponry ranging from ICBMs and hypersonic missiles to low-flying drones. By now, more than 40 years after President Ronald Reagan promised a perfect defense against ICBMs in his 1983 “Star Wars” speech, it should be all too obvious that such a leakproof shield is physically impossible, since enemy ICBMs with nuclear warheads would come in at 15,000 — and no, that is not a misprint! — miles per hour and could be surrounded by large numbers of decoy balloons that would be indistinguishable from a warhead when floating in space. There could be hundreds of such incoming warheads in a full-scale nuclear attack. To even have a chance of intercepting all of them, a defensive system would have to devote as many as 1,600 interceptors to take down incoming missiles. An analysis by the conservative American Enterprise Institute estimates that a full-blown effort to build a comprehensive Golden Dome shield could cost $3.6 trillion just to construct. 

In fact, the Golden Dome concept is so delusional that it barely merits a detailed critique, though many such analyses are available. A more reasonable way to deal with it would, of course, be ridicule.

…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Another reason AI-driven weapons may not be as cheap as advertised is that Luckey, Thiel, and their merry band of unhinged techno-optimists want to eliminate virtually any oversight of their activities, whether through independent testing of their new systems or measures to prevent price gouging by unscrupulous contractors. At present, the motto of the military tech sector is “trust me.” I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to have someone minding the store, so that the tech billionaires don’t simply rob us blind.

Of course, what would it mean if Silicon Valley could deliver cheaper, more deadly advanced weaponry? After all, artificial intelligence systems were indeed used in recent times to accelerate targeting during Israel’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza, and they have been used in President Trump’s disastrous assault on Iran. And neither of those situations has yet had a happy ending. But that’s the point. The truth is we really don’t need ever more new weaponry that kills even faster. We need to stop the killing. And that means blunting the political influence of the warmongers and war profiteers that Donald Trump criticized on the campaign trail in 2024 and then so warmly embraced as president.

And to put all of this in grim perspective, he is now presiding over perhaps the most corrupt, incompetent, repressive regime in the history of this republic. And worse yet, some of his most dismal policies — like unstinting support for Israeli aggression — have, sadly enough, had bipartisan backing in Washington. In short, he has taken what were already some of the worst American policies and accelerated them, even as he destroys positive aspects of the government like the U.S. Agency for International Development’s provision of food, clean water, and public health services abroad or any further engagement in constructive international institutions.

Among other things, he is now narrowing America’s foreign policy options by dismantling civilian tools of statecraft, while doubling down on military approaches that haven’t “won” a war in this century (or the second half of the last one either). Meanwhile, the economic damage and humanitarian costs are spreading globally, including to his own supporters. 

The challenge now is to build a movement that not only turns back Trump’s policies, but gets at the underlying economic, political, and cultural forces that have kept the United States in a permanent state of war for so long, while robbing us of opportunities to build a better, more peaceful, tolerant, and just future. Given the pace of destruction and chaos being visited upon us, it’s important to act now and continue to do so until we build enough power to rein in the war machine and begin creating actual structures of peace. https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/28/reining-in-the-pentagon-2/

May 3, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment