Palantir and Anduril formally announce a consortium to "accelerate AI capabilities for national security," merging Palantir's Maven Smart System with Anduril's Lattice battlefield management platform. On December 22, the Financial Times reports the consortium is expanding to include SpaceX, OpenAI, autonomous shipbuilder Saronic, and AI data company Scale AI — forming a Silicon Valley bloc to challenge traditional defense primes like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing for the $850 billion U.S. defense budget.
The Data Pipeline Problem
The consortium frames its mission around two problems: data readiness and processing at scale. Most battlefield sensor data — collected by drones, vehicles, weapons, and robots at the tactical edge — is not retained for AI training, meaning "exabytes of defense data indispensable for AI training are currently evaporating." The consortium proposes to capture, retain, and process this data to train military AI models. Anduril's Lattice and Menace systems handle data collection and distribution at the edge; Palantir's platform processes it at enterprise scale.
Significance
This consortium represents the formalization of a new defense-industrial cartel. Rather than competing with traditional primes on their terms, the Thiel-network companies are proposing to replace the entire architecture of how the Pentagon acquires and integrates technology. The explicit goal of saving battlefield data to train AI models means the consortium would control not just current weapons systems but the training data that determines the capabilities of all future ones. By December 2024, Palantir's market capitalization had surged to $169 billion — surpassing Lockheed Martin — signaling Wall Street's bet that this model will prevail. Critics at Responsible Statecraft warned this could create "a new monopoly" replacing the old one, with even less democratic accountability.