Militarised AI surge: $18bn drone startup valuation exposes global arms race acceleration and tech oligarchs' war profiteering
Original framing: “Drone start-up Helsing set for $18bn valuation as investors pile into defence” — Financial Times
The militarisation of Silicon Valley is not new; it traces back to the Cold War’s ARPANET, the Vietnam-era Project AGILE, and the 1990s rise of military-industrial-academic complexes like DARPA’s ties to Stanford and MIT. The current drone surge mirrors the post-9/11 'War on Terror' privatisation, where companies like Blackwater and now Helsing profit from perpetual conflict. Historical parallels also include the British East India Company’s use of 'disruptive' technology (e.g., telegraph networks) to consolidate colonial control, a precedent for today’s tech oligarchs.
The $18bn valuation of Helsing is not an isolated triumph of German ingenuity but the apex of a decades-long fusion between Silicon Valley’s extractive capitalism, state militarisation, and oligarchic wealth—epitomised by Daniel Ek’s role as both Spotify’s founder and a backer of autonomous warfare.
This convergence mirrors historical patterns of techno-colonialism, from the British East India Company’s telegraph networks to the US military’s ARPANET, where 'innovation' serves as cover for geopolitical control. The narrative’s omission of Indigenous land-based epistemologies, Global South resistance to drone warfare, and the voices of directly affected communities (e.g., Yemenis, Palestinians) reveals a power structure that treats war as a market opportunity rather than a moral failure. Yet the trickster’s edge—Hermes’ duality, Bakhtin’s carnival—exposes the absurdity of a world where billionaires profit from destruction while posing as peacemakers. The solution pathways must therefore invert this logic: demilitarising capital, centring Indigenous sovereignty, and building open-source alternatives that prioritise life over extraction. Only by dismantling the structural incentives that reward war profiteering can we break the cycle of 'disruptive' violence.