But some tech executives and engineers are wrestling with the potential harms of the shift. Once they build autonomous drones and A.I. weapons for the military, they will have little control over how the technology is deployed. That has led to debates over whether more people will be killed by these advanced weapons than traditional ones, three engineers at Google and Meta said.
“These Silicon Valley companies are hyper competitive, and in their drive to get into these defense sectors, there isn’t a lot of pausing to think,” said Margaret O’Mara, a tech historian at the University of Washington.
Rooted in Defense
Silicon Valley’s militarization is in many ways a return to the region’s roots.
Before the area was a tech epicenter, it was a bucolic land of fruit orchards. In the 1950s, the Defense Department began investing in tech companies in the region, aiming to compete with Russia’s technological advantages in the Cold War. That made the federal government the first major backer of Silicon Valley.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a division of the Department of Defense, later incubated technology — such as the internet — that became the basis for Silicon Valley’s largest companies. In 1998, the Stanford graduate students Sergey Brin and Larry Page received funding from Darpa and other government agencies to create Google.
But in the late 1990s and 2000s, tech companies turned toward consumer technology such as e-commerce and social networks. They presented themselves as doing good and democratizing technology for the masses, drawing a largely liberal work force that was opposed to working with the defense establishment.