The Pentagon paid $480 million for a prototype. The contract ceiling is now $13 billion. This isn’t a tank or a missile. It’s software that helps decide what counts as a target. And here’s the uncomfortable part: it can’t realistically be switched off anymore. I went through a report on US and EU AI surveillance procurement for 2024–2026, built on SAM.gov and EU TED tender data. It’s more alarming than it looks. First. Governments stopped buying hardware. They’re buying data fusion platforms. Maven, built by Palantir, is used daily by 20,000 military analysts, with up to 20 billion tokens a day running through it. Disconnecting from a system like that becomes practically impossible. Second. A border without people. Anduril towers for CBP: a $2 billion contract, $818 million spent so far. The towers detect and classify a person on their own from up to 2.8 km (about 1.7 miles). The operator only gets shown “anomalies.” Third. Anonymity is disappearing. ICE paid Clearview AI $9.2 million for access to a database of 50+ billion images. A face in a crowd gets tied to social media profiles. Fourth. Europe is no better. Frontex is putting €184.3 million into heavy surveillance drones over the sea, with the data feeding into EUROSUR. A boat gets intercepted by another country’s coast guard, and formally there’s no pushback. Fifth, and the biggest paradox. The EU AI Act bans social scoring and mass real-time facial recognition in public spaces (with carve-outs for law enforcement), but classifies systems like EES and ETIAS only as “high risk.” Compliance costs millions, so only the big players can afford it. A law meant to protect citizens ends up building a moat around monopolies. Who wins? Palantir and Anduril. Gross margins of 40–45% versus 8–10% for the traditional defense giants. They don’t sell a product, they rent out an algorithm. The government becomes a permanent tenant. The direction is clear: from reacting to crime to predicting it. Tech battle-tested in war moves to the border. Then to policing. It gets tested first on people with no voice. Then they come for everyone else. submitted by /u/tohangout
Originally posted by u/tohangout on r/ArtificialInteligence