Details
In late July 2025, the US Army quietly signed one of the largest defence contracts in American history. A 10-billion-dollar deal handed control over battlefield intelligence, logistics, homeland security, and immigration control systems to Palantir Technologies, the data-analytics firm co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel. Officially framed as an efficiency reform, the contract in fact transferred core sovereign security functions to a private company whose founder has openly declared that “freedom and democracy are no longer compatible”.
Francesca Bria is the lead researcher of the Authoritarian Stack. She is a Professor at UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose in London, a Board Member of the European Innovation Council, President of the Innovation Agency of Emilia-Romagna, and founder of the EuroStack Initiative.
This was no isolated transaction. Under Donald Trump’s second administration, a new formation has crystallized in Washington: a coalition of tech billionaires, venture capitalists, and ideologues engineering what we call the “Authoritarian Stack” — a vertically integrated system of privatized control extending from cloud platforms and AI models to autonomous drones, military satellites, and even monetary infrastructure. At its helm stand Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, and David Sacks, whose investments now align with a political project: the remaking of sovereignty itself as a private asset class.
Beyond the Old Military-Industrial Complex
Unlike the Cold War-era military-industrial complex, this formation is faster, transnational, and ideologically coherent. It does not march with tanks or lobby Congress from the outside. Instead, it embeds itself through personnel pipelines, procurement loops, and technical architectures without which the state can no longer function. Silicon Valley is no longer building apps — it is building empires.
The mechanisms of capture are now visible. The Pentagon has begun commissioning Silicon Valley executives directly into military ranks through Detachment 201, a programme that counts among its officers Palantir’s chief technologist, Meta’s AI chief, and product leads from OpenAI. The revolving door between government and industry has become a structural merger. US Vice President J.D. Vance rose to power after Thiel poured 15 million dollars into his 2022 Senate campaign. Former Anduril and Palantir executives now occupy key positions across the Army, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and federal agencies.
Procurement, too, has inverted. Where the government once dictated standards to suppliers, private platforms now set the rules. Palantir’s data architectures define what federal agencies can see and decide. Nowhere is this more consequential than at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In April 2025, ICE awarded Palantir a 30-million-dollar contract to build ImmigrationOS, a surveillance platform designed to provide “near real-time visibility” into migrants’ movements, streamline targeting and apprehension, and track so-called “self-deportations”. Leaked internal communications show Palantir engineers working in rapid sprints to help locate individuals flagged for removal.
Infrastructure is never neutral. Who builds it, owns it, and governs it determines the future.
The conflict of interest is structural. Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff and chief architect of its mass-deportation policy, reportedly holds up to 250,000 dollars in Palantir stock. The company’s share price rose by roughly 80 percent in 2025, driven largely by expanding government contracts.
Anduril’s autonomous drones shape the parameters of combat. SpaceX’s orbital systems underpin military command and control. In domestic policy, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency deploys algorithmic models to automate budget cuts in welfare and healthcare, embedding austerity directly into code — political choices executed without a legislature.
All of this is underwritten by a coherent worldview. Doctrines once confined to fringe blogs have entered the mainstream of American governance: the “Dark Enlightenment” with its suspicion of democracy, “effective accelerationism” with its faith in speed over consensus, crypto-anarcho-capitalism with its dream of private money beyond regulation. This is what we mean by the Authoritarian Stack: not a metaphor, but a stacked system — doctrine, capital, regulation, infrastructure — forming an integrated architecture of post-democratic control.
The Stakes for Europe
This architecture is not contained by national borders. Its gravitational pull is already reshaping Europe’s security, migration, and digital infrastructure — not through NATO treaties alone, but through contracts and platforms that bind European states to US firms whose loyalties are to investors, not parliaments.
In the United Kingdom, Palantir now provides the National Health Service with a 330-million-pound federated data platform covering tens of millions of patient records, procured without meaningful public debate. In Germany, Palantir has supplied software for counter-terrorism and law enforcement, while Anduril’s joint venture with Rheinmetall promises to deploy autonomous drone swarms across NATO. Italy has quietly signed contracts to integrate Elon Musk’s Starlink terminals across military and emergency communications networks. In Brussels, officials privately admit that the EU’s migration agenda is now technologically dependent on US-born systems.
Each contract chips away at Europe’s capacity to govern independently. When critical infrastructure depends on platforms controlled by individuals who openly endorse European far-right parties and interfere in national elections, sovereignty becomes theatrical fiction. Elon Musk openly endorsed the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) during the German elections, declaring “only the AfD can save Germany” — despite the party being under surveillance by German intelligence for extremism. At the same time, Musk controls critical infrastructure with the power to determine whether Ukraine goes dark on the battlefield.
What ties these cases together is not only technical reliance but ideological seepage. The firms entering Europe are part of the same venture-backed, ideologically coherent bloc driving the current authoritarian turn in Washington. When Palantir or Anduril sell Europe a platform, they are not just exporting software — they are exporting a worldview in which dominance, surveillance, monopoly, and force override democratic deliberation.
Europe faces an existential choice: build genuine technological sovereignty now, or accept governance by Silicon Valley platforms whose architects view democracy as an obsolete operating system to be replaced.
Making Power Visible
This is the context in which the Authoritarian Stack project has emerged. Developed by a network of researchers, journalists, and technologists, the project aims to map, name, and expose the architecture of this new power formation — its ideology, infrastructure, actors, and threat to democratic self-determination.
The project delivers three core components. First, an investigative visual long-read that traces the rise of the Authoritarian Stack through public documents and original research, showing how a handful of tech leaders and venture capitalists have, within a decade, translated techno-authoritarian ideology into unprecedented institutional influence over US military contracts, financial infrastructure, and key government posts.
If democracy is to survive the age of AI wars, privatized orbital networks, and authoritarian algorithmic governance, it must reclaim its own technological foundations.
Second, an interactive network map that makes evidence-linked power relationships visible to the public: capital flows, ideological alliances, government contracts, and institutional capture across more than 200 actors. The mapping follows a conceptual framework breaking the system into five interdependent layers: doctrine, regulation, capital, infrastructure, and key sectors like defence, aerospace, and energy. By tagging each actor and connection with these categories, the map becomes a living tool for tracing how concentrated tech capital reshapes institutional power — and for intervening in its narrative.
Third, a policy syllabus providing journalists, campaigners, and policymakers with the intellectual tools to understand and contest this formation — annotated readings organized by ideological worldview, strategic sector, and case study.
Why This Matters Now
Infrastructure is never neutral. Who builds it, owns it, and governs it determines the future. The techno-authoritarians understand this, which is why they have shifted from arguing against democracy to building its replacement. They don’t need to convince voters — they need to control infrastructure. They don’t need to capture the state — they need to become its operating system.
The point of the Authoritarian Stack is not merely to describe a set of firms but to name a political formation. To map it is to expose it. To expose it is to make it contestable. Naming it forces the recognition that what is at stake is not efficiency or innovation, but the future of democratic self-determination.
If democracy is to survive the age of AI wars, privatized orbital networks, and authoritarian algorithmic governance, it must reclaim its own technological foundations. That means investing in public infrastructures — clouds, chips, identity systems, defence platforms — built to serve citizens and democracy, not oligarchs. It means writing doctrines of democratic technology as deliberately as the Authoritarian Tech Right has written its post-democratic ones. And it means refusing to confuse private capture with public interest.
The Authoritarian Tech Right has a plan, and it is advancing with speed. Democracies must answer with equal clarity and greater legitimacy. The stack can be governed — but only if it is first seen for what it is: not a technical trend, but the architecture of a new kind of power.
The Authoritarian Stack was launched with financial support from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
