Tech giants, the arms industry and the weaponisation of AI
- The tech and arms sectors are fusing into a new military-industrial complex
- Companies have abandoned their own ethical and legal red lines
- Increasingly autonomous weapons are proliferating and being battle-tested
- AI decision-support systems are squashing the kill chain and turn meaningful human control impossible
- The same technologies drive mass surveillance and the erosion of privacy, in war and as part of the surveillance state
- Civilian digital infrastructure has become both weapon and target
In our report, PAX and Privacy International examine the rapid militarisation of data-intensive technologies and the deepening of convergence between tech giants and arms producers. Amid booming military budgets and unprecedented investment in artificial intelligence, we document how some of the world’s largest technology companies have become key suppliers to the military, while traditional arms producers race to build increasingly autonomous weapons — two once-distinct sectors that are now fusing.
Through an overview of military contracts, we examine some of the companies driving this shift: the computing-hardware producers whose chips and networks underpin modern warfare (AMD, Cisco, IBM and Nvidia); the tech giants supplying cloud services, software and generative AI (Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and SpaceX); the venture-backed “neo-primes” Anduril and Palantir; and the world’s five largest arms producers (BAE Systems, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and RTX). We also look briefly at China, the only other state with comparable capacity. The selection is deliberately weighted towards the biggest players and is, by design, not exhaustive.
Across these profiles, we trace a set of shared concerns: the spread of AI decision-support systems that compress the kill chain and weaken meaningful human control; the erosion of companies’ own ethical commitments; and a dangerous concentration of power in a handful of firms with unusually close ties to government. We argue that these developments are outpacing the rules meant to govern them and make the case—to states and companies alike—for binding international rules, grounded in international humanitarian law and international human rights law, covering AI in the military domain, and corporate accountability.