AI's Mad Money Is Profiting From Death in Iran and Gaza

AI is the road to mad money in the US, according to the business press. How mad is this money? Let’s turn to the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest people in America.

The bar to join this list has never been higher, at $4.4 billion now. That’s an increase of $600 million, 60% of $1 billion, versus the past year. Living large has never been so, well, large.

Nice work if you can get it, no? In a capitalist society, the accumulation of such mind-boggling wealth is the highest priority for the ruling class. In 2026, the AI mad money grab is on.

Silicon Valley is a part of—not apart from—Uncle Sam’s military machinery,

US pre-tax corporate profits hit an annualized $4.8 trillion in the second quarter of 2026, according to the Bureau of Economic Affairs, 18% of national income. That’s the biggest share of profits in the national income since just after World War II.

What about labor’s share of national income? Well, national income from benefits and wages has dropped to 60%, the lowest share in seven decades. Credit AI and corporate pricing power, a euphemism for monopoly control of the supply of a commodity.

AI is no benign thing that enables billionaires’ wealth. In fact, AI has grabbed much attention since an Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, warned that AI “could kill us all by the end of the decade.” However, AI lethality is here now.

Take the Israeli military, with the financial and political backing of Uncle Sam, using AI to maim and murder Palestinian civilians in Gaza. For these victims, Israel’s use of AI is rampant, according to author Chris de Ploeg in his new book, The Exterminating Empire: Capitalism’s War on Life from Palestine to the Burning Planet (Monthly Review Press, 2026).

Further, de Ploeg writes: “Gaza has been turned into the world‘s largest death camp ever to have existed. The murders are carried out, industrially, with bombs and algorithms."

He continues: “Think of the infamous 'Operation Lavender,' in which suspected militants, based on nothing more than an AI algorithm, are deliberately bombed when they are at home with their family, not on the battlefield. The structural murder of entire families—nearly three thousand multigenerational bloodlines wiped off the face of the Earth—can easily be explained by AI.”

Israel wages digital genocide against Palestinians.

We turn to the US war of aggression against Iran. “AI targeting system doubles pace of US strikes in Iran,” reads a March 25 headline in the Arizona News. “The US military says it hit about 1,000 targets in Iran during the first 24 hours of attacks, double the number struck during the 2003 'shock and awe' campaign in Iraq."

“The difference, according to the Pentagon, is artificial intelligence. The Pentagon’s Maven Smart System uses AI to process data from sensors, satellite imagery, and other sources to enable rapid targeting decisions. What once took hours or days now takes minutes, according to military officials.”

Silicon Valley is a part of—not apart from—Uncle Sam’s military machinery, as Malcom Harris details in Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World (Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2023). In brief, the ruling class owns AI and the media, and the political duopoly reflects the owners' view that grabbing market share and profits is primary for society. Empathy and solidarity are signs of weakness.

What is (not) to be done concerning Big Technology? Consider the view of House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). He favors a hands-off approach, dismissing federal policies to regulate AI. He shared the sentiment with Jake Tapper of CNN.

According to Rep. Johnson: “If Congress just races in and does some sort of emergency session to try to regulate AI, we will lose the race to China, and that is a threat to every single American. So, we’ve got to have balance. We’ve got to have steady hands at the wheel.”

The China threat is alive and well. The message is clear. Be afraid, not of unregulated AI, but China, which happens to be the manufacturing power of the world. Thus bringing AI under public control is a low priority, politically speaking, for Rep. Johnson.

Establishing how to achieve an outcome of public control is an agenda that threatens private profits. Americans opposing the building of AI data centers that destroy the environment near their communities are putting their lives and those of neighbors first.

Just ask the people living near an Equinix Data Center that spilled 5,500 gallons of diesel fuel into Anderson Creek, a mudflat that ebbs and flows with the tides, in Secaucus, New Jersey recently.

Ben Dziobek is the executive director of The Climate Revolution Action Network, a Gen Z environmental activist group in New Jersey.

“The spill was indicative of a larger problem that municipalities can approve data centers,” according to him, “but we really cannot guarantee where the pollution is gonna go. And it is way too early to tell if there's been serious damage. The Department of Environmental Protections' findings that nothing has been harmed as of yet is a procedural way to say they found nothing that is dead in the ecosystem."

"It’s gonna take some time to understand, and this is just all the more reason why we need a statewide moratorium on building new AI data centers in New Jersey for three years. AI is the most complex technology in the whole world, and is running these data centers. Yet a computer glitch at the AI data center in New Jersey spilled diesel fuel into our wetlands.”

And as the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans shows, AI is also the road to super wealth. For example, the list has “15 of the 34 new names (and nearly 60% of all newcomers' wealth) coming from the sector—mainly from AI giants or AI-related ventures.”

AI mad money is a public enemy stateside and abroad.