SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
drones
Trump Sons Accused of Trying to Profit Off Father’s Iran War With Drone Investment
"The most corrupt family ever is profiting from all of the death and destruction Trump is responsible for," said one critic.
Mar 09, 2026
There's no end in sight to President Donald Trump's unprovoked and unconstitutional war with Iran, and two of the president's children appear ready to cash in.
The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump are investing in a Florida-based drone company called Powerus that "is vying to meet fresh demand from the Pentagon" for drones that started when the Trump administration banned foreign-made drones and drone components from the US in December.
The company will soon be going public by merging with Aureus Greenway Holdings, a publicly traded golf-course holding company that is also backed by the Trumps, and is expected to make its debut on the Nasdaq stock exchange in the coming months.
"Investors in the deal include one of the Trumps’ investment vehicles, American Ventures," reported the Journal, "and Unusual Machines, a drone components company where Donald Trump Jr. is a shareholder and advisory board member... Powerus is also a customer of Unusual Machines."
In an interview with the Journal, Powerus CEO Andrew Fox predicted robust demand for his company's products, commenting that the drone market "is certainly going to grow faster than, say, golf courses are."
Eric Trump confirmed and defended his investment in the drone firm, replying to the Journal in a social media post that "I happen to believe drones will be a much better investment than companies that still print newspapers."
Many critics, however, accused the two eldest Trump sons of seeking to profit off a war started by their own father. As the New York Times reported on Saturday, drones have become "a defining feature" of the Iran war, as they have been used by both sides in the conflict to launch explosives at targets at a fraction of what traditional missile barrages would cost.
"Rushing to cash in on Daddy's failed war before they've even gotten Barron and Kai to enlist," wrote journalist Marcy Wheeler. "Truly deplorable behavior, but what we expect from these corrupt reprobates."
University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato argued that the Trump sons' efforts to rake in cash from the war shouldn't be surprising.
"Always a money-making angle for the Trump family," Sabato wrote. "Why should the War with Iran be any different?"
Sabato's words were echoed by fellow political scientist Norman Ornstein, who observed "it’s always about the grift" when it comes to the Trump family.
Melanie D'Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, argued that the Trump sons' drone investment should cast a pall across the entire Iran war venture.
"Reminder as Trump starts wars, sells weapons and bombs everyone," D'Arrigo wrote. "The Trump family has a military drone company with military contracts, currently vying to meet Pentagon demand after the Trump administration recently banned new Chinese drones. The most corrupt family ever is profiting from all of the death and destruction Trump is responsible for."
In 2025, at least two companies backed by Trump Jr. received contracts collectively worth hundreds of millions of dollars from the US Department of Defense.
Kedric Payne, general counsel at the Campaign Legal Center, said in an interview with the Financial Times last year that the government deals scored by Trump Jr.-backed companies look ethically dubious even if the president’s son didn’t directly use his influence to procure them.
“Presidents are expected to avoid even the appearance that they are using their office to financially benefit themselves or their family,” he said. “While we do not know for certain if, or how, the president may have influenced this loan, it falls under the cloud of conflicts of interest we have seen throughout this administration.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
Hegseth Demands Anthropic Let Military Use AI However It Wants—Even for Autonomous Killer Drones and Spying On Americans
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said the company that owns the AI assistant Claude would be punished unless it drops all ethical guidelines.
Feb 25, 2026
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has threatened to punish the artificial intelligence company Anthropic if it doesn't let the Pentagon use its technology however it wants—apparently even to create autonomous killer drones or conduct surveillance of Americans.
Anthropic's powerful AI model, Claude, is currently the only one permitted to handle classified military data, and the company was awarded a $200 million contract last year to develop AI capabilities for the Department of Defense to use alongside other AI firms.
However, the company's usage policy prohibits its use for mass surveillance and for the development of autonomous weapons—such as drones that attack targets without a human operator.
These limitations have infuriated the Defense Department leadership. On Tuesday, Hegseth called Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, to a meeting at the Pentagon, where he demanded "unfettered" access to Claude without any guardrails.
This goal was outlined last month in the department's "AI Strategy" memo, which called for the US to adopt an "AI-first warfighting force" and for companies to allow their technology to be deployed for "any lawful use," free from ethical safeguards.
According to a senior defense official who spoke to Axios, Hegseth issued an ultimatum to Amodei on Tuesday: If he does not grant the Pentagon unrestricted use of Anthropic's technology by 5:01 pm on Friday, the department would take measures to coerce the company.
It would either declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," effectively blacklisting it for military use and ending its contract, or it would invoke the Defense Production Act, which would force the company to tailor the product to the military's needs.
While it would not be an unusual step for the Pentagon to cut ties with Anthropic, threats to declare it a supply chain risk have been described as extraordinary.
Jessica Tillipman, the associate dean for government procurement law studies at George Washington University, who specializes in AI governance, wrote on social media that the threat of "declaring Anthropic a supply chain risk is deeply problematic," as it's "generally something we reserve for products that create security risks, and using it in this way undermines its purpose."
As Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote on Wednesday for Reason, it "would mean anyone who wants to work with the US military in any capacity must sever ties with the AI company," which could deal a major blow to the business.
Last month, Amodei published an essay about how "AI-enabled autocracies" could use the technology to surveil and repress their citizens and wage war on less developed countries:
A swarm of millions or billions of fully automated armed drones, locally controlled by powerful AI and strategically coordinated across the world by an even more powerful AI, could be an unbeatable army, capable of both defeating any military in the world and suppressing dissent within a country by following around every citizen...
A powerful AI looking across billions of conversations from millions of people could gauge public sentiment, detect pockets of disloyalty forming, and stamp them out before they grow. This could lead to the imposition of a true panopticon on a scale that we don’t see today.
Amodei reportedly resisted Hegseth's demands to lift restrictions at Tuesday's meeting, refusing to budge on the two key issues of mass surveillance and autonomous weapons. Following reports of the meeting, the company has said it still wants to work with the government while also ensuring its models are used in line with what they could “reliably and responsibly do.”
A senior Pentagon spokesperson said the military must be free to use the technology how it sees fit. According to the Associated Press, the official argued that "the Pentagon has only issued lawful orders and stressed that using Anthropic’s tools legally would be the military’s responsibility."
The question of whether the Pentagon has issued only "lawful" orders is in dispute—in fact, the Pentagon is fighting to cut the retirement pay of Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), a retired Navy captain, after he made a video in November reminding active duty troops that they have a duty not to obey illegal orders.
That video was made in response to reports that Hegseth had given orders to bomb the survivors of one of the administration's boat strikes in the Caribbean—an act described as a potential "war crime" amid a broader campaign that legal experts have said is illegal under both US and international law.
The military also reportedly used Claude as part of another legally questionable act last month: the operation to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, which involved bombing across Caracas and killed at least 83 people. It is not clear how the model was used during the attack.
While the Pentagon has not specified which restricted activities it wishes to pursue using Anthropic's technology, Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) said that with his demands, Hegseth was essentially telling the company, "Let us use your AI for mass surveillance, or we’ll pull your contract."
Under President Donald Trump, Gallego added, “corporations are punished for refusing to spy on American citizens.”
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Algorithms of Collapse
Capitalism has elected AI as the next tool to distribute and dismantle labor, create a new power structure in the world, and repress social and political movements.
Jan 25, 2026
AI is being diffused throughout society under chatbots, models, and agents which are explicitly reactionary and create communicative and physical walls to defend the status quo.
Capitalism has elected AI as the next tool to distribute and dismantle labor, create a new power structure in the world, and repress social and political movements. Unchecked, it will bring us right up to a collapse brought on by war and climate chaos.
Forget about the Terminator stories of Artificial General Intelligence and Artificial Superintelligence. These are closer to sci-fi than to reality. We don’t need to speculate about things that don’t exist in the AI realm. What we do need to look at are the things that already exist and are being deployed massively.
The main objective of AI is the automation of historical automation itself. AI holds an irresistible promise for capitalist elites: to be able to automatically direct most of the instructions that guide human activity, reducing the power of social classes other than the owners of the algorithms. Complete economic and social planning for the rich. In particular, they want to reduce the power that the working class has exercised in the past, the power to push toward the future and gain the political, social, and economic transformations that reduce or eliminate inequality and injustice.
Data centers today are nightmare factories.
A key and complementary objective of AI is to create an overwhelming monopoly over knowledge, codified via Large Language Models, Computer Vision, Convolutional Neural Networks, and other Machine “Learning” models. This monopoly is being designed to utterly transform social relations and install a reactionary hegemony that widely surpasses neoliberal capitalism and feeds a far-right dystopia.
The third essential objective has to do with the control of violence and political repression. For that effect, AI provides different tools to be used in declared and now mostly-undeclared states of war. During the Gaza genocide, human targets were chosen with AI, its models were used to determine the biggest impacts for sequences of targets in order to achieve maximum infrastructure and human suffering consequences. Obviously, AI is used to maximize efficiency in all war logistics, calculating payloads, schedules, and material distribution. In Ukraine, most of the war is being conducted with drones, many of them autonomous and with self-selecting target capabilities powered by AI. Automated killing machines that don’t question orders or targets are not only available, but already deployed in different war fronts. On the other hand, automated political repression and persecution in the streets and protests is growing, though it is currently at the data gathering and training phase. In the USA, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is deploying different apps developed by companies like Palantir to maximize social disruption and to capture the most vulnerable people in the country.
There is huge pressure to prevent any meaningful regulation of AI, in particular for AI used by police and the military. Surveillance with facial (FRT) and body recognition is used outdoors to map out movements and participants in protests and actions. Mapping of movement connections and alliances can be done via online pattern recognition, as well as out in the streets. Automatic protest repression combined with purposeful miscommunication and disinformation might make the usual protests simply nonviable.
And of course, AI can is being used for hacking by private companies and states. Considering the hackable systems now in place throughout society and the economy—banking systems, social security, electric and transport systems, aviation and navigation systems, pension management, surveillance apparatus, healthcare systems and, of course, all the internet and the data in public and private servers—massively disruptive events at large or small scale are inevitable. Many political and social movements will be targeted. This can mean accounts erased, financial assets blockaded, and growing personal political repression via the suppression of communication capacities. This can also happen at a much bigger scale, targeting cities, countries or entire regions.
For the most important investments and political efforts, AI is being introduced as a labor replacement tool, a cultural hegemony monopoly creator, a military and surveillance weapon. Most of this is being done with people actively engaging and inviting the models into their everyday life (even more than it already was). The resistance to large data center projects is important and inspiring, but the overwhelming threat of AI goes well beyond its emissions, water consumption, and land occupation (although they plan on multiplying by many factors the current numbers, especially in Europe). Data centers today are nightmare factories.
So far, AI hasn’t been able to deliver on a key aspect: successfully automated processes that allow for the mass firing of people, substituted by effective algorithms. This is clear: 95% of all investment made by companies in AI has led to no profit, which is making capitalists nervous. But it hasn’t in any meaningful way stopped its spread.
When we say AI, we mean Machine Learning, Robotics, and Expert Systems. Currently AI is mostly a process of recognition, classification, and very high probability calculation, based on massive amounts of data with a good human interface. The interface is the most important trick for the general public. The public debate surrounding this issue is deeply anti-historical and anti-materialist, almost entirely it is white noise.
AI is not replicating or reproducing human intelligence. It is trying to encode human activities into repeatable procedures that can create reproducible algorithms. As it is not imitating our biological intelligence, it is trying to imitate what it can more or less “comprehend” about the previously referred algorithms—it is copying labor and social relations, their mechanisms and their predictable outcomes. Like other abstractions that rule our lives, such as money, algorithms produce real outcomes. AI ushers an irresistible promise for capitalist elites: to be able to automatically direct most of the instructions that guide human activity, reducing the power of social relations, in particular the power of the working class to impose political, social, and economic transformations that reduce inequality and injustice.
AI’s neural networks don’t mimic the human brain at all, but instead automate the “labor of perception,” classifying and interpreting written, numeric, and visual data and establishing associations. This creates a synthesis of knowledge, of the collective form of knowledge that comes from social cooperation. As explained before, another of its objectives has been to establish a monopoly over knowledge, scrapped from every website, database, online encyclopedia, and bite it is fed. It is then no wonder that Elon Musk and the far-right are going after Wikipedia.
These are some of the reasons why attempting to hard-code ethical rules or constraints into these models will not work, as they will not change the underlying political and economic functions of the data it is trained under and the algorithms generated and fabricated. Of course we understand that language itself is an algorithm, all the data as well and, of course, the internet as well. But with AI, we’re talking about a new level of control. The fundamental abstract purposes of AI as it exists now are the extension of quantification, control, and exploitation. The Labor Theory of Automation posits that AI is the result of a set of technological advancements that have abstracted automation to the point where it can automate itself. As we now have the technical ability to make such machines and capitalism has the economic incentive to massively deploy them, they want to use it to reorganize the division of labor even further in their favor. It is the apex of automation: Automation of Automation.
Facing such seemingly insurmountable odds, social and ruptural movements cannot but ask what to do about AI. There are basically two options: Drop out of the grid or acquire tech capabilities that allow us to resist the onslaught of these algorithms of collapse.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular