The list drawn up this year includes Amazon, Anduril Industries, Meta, Northrop Grumman, Palantir Technologies, Space Exploration Technologies and Vanguard. These computing and technology giants are advancing escalating militarism, pushing for broad deregulation in the defence sector, failing to respect human and worker rights and, through wealth concentration, succeeding in imposing new forms of governance based on ever‑greater technological and digital control and user profiling. Data are, indeed, the real gold mine of techno‑capitalist companies.
Amazon
The company of billionaire Jeff Bezos, known worldwide and from which Western consumers purchase and receive countless goods every year, regularly holds events in the defence sector and has concluded a US$1.2 billion agreement with Google and the far‑right Israeli government to intensify the surveillance of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories. According to a United Nations Special Rapporteur’s report, Amazon supports the Israeli cloud infrastructure Project Nimbus, which military officials have described as “a weapon in every sense”. Bezos’ company also spent at least US$19.1 million on lobbying the U.S. government in 2024 in order to maintain Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the principal cloud computing provider for the arms industry. And in 2025, it lobbied to prevent regulation of artificial intelligence. Amazon’s influence does not stop there, extending into intelligence agencies: the online retail giant has a US$10 billion contract with the National Security Agency, several contracts supporting the Department of Defense’s Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability and hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with the CIA. This means Amazon collaborates directly in national intelligence activities, likely having a say in decisions and the operations of the secret services.
On the equity and social‑justice front, there is a vast disparity between executive pay and that of workers: for example, Amazon’s current CEO Andy Jassy earns a salary 43 times higher than the average Amazon employee, while the company invests millions of dollars in anti‑union consultants to suppress its employees’ organisation and protests around the world.
Anduril Industries and Meta
Anduril, probably the least well known of the companies on the list, is a US‑based firm specialising in defence systems based on artificial intelligence, including autonomous drones, surveillance towers, AI for battlefield decision‑making, border security systems and virtual military training software. In short, it is the company building the infrastructure for automated war —where machines can kill autonomously—and digital surveillance at scale. The firm works for the U.S. Department of Defence, the Border Patrol and NATO allies’ military forces.
As for Meta Platforms, the company of Mark Zuckerberg that runs Facebook and Instagram, it was already under scrutiny for censoring several users on its social media platforms, particularly during the Covid‑19 pandemic, based also on U.S. government directives. Recently, Meta censored content that denounced the genocide in Gaza and expressed support for the Palestinian resistance. It went so far as to denounce those within the company who opposed the censorship. At the same time, it permitted on its social platforms advertisements from Israeli real‑estate agencies promoting housing sales in villages and localities of the Occupied West Bank. Also, Zuckerberg’s colossus is increasingly turning its technologies to military purposes: for example, it revoked the ban on military use of its AI “Llama” for U.S. companies and announced a partnership with Anduril to develop virtual‑reality headsets for controlling unmanned field machines. The Pentagon also uses Meta’s AI: this is a large‑scale language model built from public and licensed data, obtained from user posts on Facebook and Instagram and user interactions with Meta’s artificial intelligence. These data can now be used by the U.S. military and defence‑industry contractors for surveillance and warfare purposes.
Palantir and Vanguard Technologies
Over the span of two decades, Palantir Technologies, owned by billionaire Peter Thiel, has effectively become the data operating system for war, policing, immigration control and intelligence analysis. Palantir has accumulated at least US$1.3 billion in U.S. military contracts to build next‑generation surveillance platforms used by both the armed forces and the national police. The big‑data analytics firm is playing a decisive role in the besieged Gaza Strip, where its products support Israel’s application of an AI‑based targeting system known as “Lavender”. The company’s board is openly pro‑Israeli and in January 2025 it held its first meeting in Tel Aviv declaring explicit support for Israel. Throughout May, Palantir shares soared, making it the top‑performing company in the S&P 500 index. Palantir’s espionage system also enables mass surveillance of U.S. civilians through personal‑data collection.
The U.S. investment‑advisor firm Vanguard Group, meanwhile, is the world’s largest investor in nuclear‑weapons production. In 2022 Vanguard invested a staggering US$68.2 billion in nuclear‑weapons‑producing companies including Aerojet Rocketdyne (US/UK), Airbus (Netherlands), BAE Systems (UK), Boeing (US), General Dynamics (US), Honeywell (US), L3Harris (US), Leonardo (Italy), Lockheed Martin (US), Northrop Grumman (US), RTX (US), Safran (France) and Thales (France). It is also among the top two shareholders of Amazon (7.97 %), Palantir (9.43 %), Northrop Grumman (9.37 %) and Meta (8.88 %).
The conduct of these companies demonstrates how the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few billionaires also results in a concentration of power that immediately drains meaning and credibility from so‑called democratic societies, in which the decisions that matter are not taken by citizens but are based on the power of money. This is what is defined as a “plutocracy”. It finds its pulsating centre in large technological companies, in Silicon Valley and in the powerful international finance sector. Needless to say that this oligarchy pursues a dystopian agenda of technological control and digital profiling of the population and is now swinging radically towards the arms sector, given also the troubling and uncertain geopolitical scenario. All of this also shows how technology — considered a triumph of modern civilisation — can quickly be employed in warfare sectors causing destruction and death as the case of Gaza demonstrates. Such a concentration of power in a narrow circle of individuals — who often embrace the transhumanist and techno scientist ideology — can only further erode workers’ rights and influence the global political agenda in an authoritarian direction strongly inclined to war, oppression and militarisation. All this while Western economies undergo a sharp decline.
See, Lobbismo, oppressione, militarizzazione dell’economia: la lista delle aziende peggiori al mondo

Photo: Anduril' Industries, the Defence Industries' Future

*With a degree in Economics and Cultural Asset Management from the Catholic University of Milan. She focuses mainly on geopolitics and economics with particular attention to international dynamics and global power relations.