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Warning Against Taxpayer Bailout for Big Tech, Critics Fume Over OpenAI Execs' Talk of Government Loans
"Big Tech is building a mountain of speculative infrastructure," warned one critic. "Now it wants the US government to prop up the bubble before it bursts."
Nov 06, 2025
Tech giant OpenAI generated significant backlash this week after one of its top executives floated potential loan guarantees from the US government to help fund its massive infrastructure buildout.
In a Wednesday interview with The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar suggested that the federal government could get involved in infrastructure development for artificial intelligence by offering a "guarantee," which she said could "drop the cost of the financing" and increase the amount of debt her firm could take on.
When asked if she was specifically talking about a "federal backstop for chip investment," she replied, "Exactly."
Hours after the interview, Friar walked back her remarks and insisted that "OpenAI is not seeking a government backstop for our infrastructure commitments," while adding that she was "making the point that American strength in technology will come from building real industrial capacity, which requires the private sector and government playing their part."
Despite Friar's walk-back, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during a podcast interview with economist Tyler Cowen that released on Thursday that he believed the government ultimately could be a backstop to the artificial intelligence industry.
"When something gets sufficiently huge... the federal government is kind of the insurer of last resort, as we've seen in various financial crises," he said. "Given the magnitude of what I expect AI's economic impact to look like, I do think the government ends up as the insurer of last resort."
Friar and Altman's remarks about government backstops for OpenAI loans drew the immediate ire of Robert Weissman, co-president of consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen, who expressed concerns that the tech industry may have already opened up talks about loan guarantees with President Donald Trump's administration.
"Given the Trump regime’s eagerness to shower taxpayer subsidies and benefits on favored corporations, it is entirely possible that OpenAI and the White House are concocting a scheme to siphon taxpayer money into OpenAI’s coffers, perhaps with some tribute paid to Trump and his family." Weissman said. "Perhaps not so coincidentally, OpenAI President Greg Brockman was among the attendees at a dinner for donors to Trump’s White House ballroom, though neither he nor OpenAI have been reported to be actual donors."
JB Branch, Public Citizen’s Big Tech accountability advocate, said even suggesting government backstops for OpenAI showed that the company and its executives were "completely out of touch with reality," and he argued it was no coincidence that Friar floated the possibility of federal loan guarantees at a time when many analysts have been questioning whether the AI industry is an unsustainable financial bubble.
"The truth is simple: the AI bubble is swelling, and OpenAI knows it," he said. "Big Tech is building a mountain of speculative infrastructure without real-world demands or proven productivity-enhancing use cases to justify it. Now it wants the US government to prop up the bubble before it bursts. This is an escape plan for an industry that has overpromised and underdelivered."
An MIT Media Lab report found in September that while AI use has doubled in workplaces since 2023, 95% of organizations that have invested in the technology have seen "no measurable return on their investment."
Concerns about an AI bubble intensified earlier this week when investor Michael Burry, who famously made a fortune by short-selling the US housing market ahead of the 2008 financial crisis, revealed that his firm was making bets against Nvidia and Palantir, two of the biggest players in the AI industry.
This has led to some AI industry players to complain that markets and governments are undervaluing their products.
During her Wednesday WSJ interview, for instance, Friar complained that "I don’t think there’s enough exuberance about AI, when I think about the actual practical implications and what it can do for individual."
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, meanwhile, told the Financial Times that China was going to beat the US in the race to develop high-powered artificial intelligence because the Chinese government offers more energy subsidies to AI and doesn't put as much regulation on AI development.
Huang also complained that "we need more optimism" about the AI industry in the US.
Investment researcher Ross Hendricks, however, dismissed Huang's warning about China winning the AI battle, and he accused the Nvidia CEO of seeking special government favors.
"This is nothing more than Jensen Huang foaming the runway for a federal AI bailout in coordination with OpenAI's latest plea in the WSJ," he commented in a post on X. "These grifters simply can't be happy making billions from one of the greatest investment manias of all time. They'll do everything possible to loot taxpayers to prevent it from popping."
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The Disappearance Machine
If this machine succeeds, it will not stop with immigrants. It will become the blueprint for domestic control and the silencing of millions.
Aug 30, 2025
"What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it from happening again."—Anne Frank
US President Donald Trump has federalized the DC police department and put more than 2,000 National Guard troops on city streets, even as crime remains at historic lows. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seizing more than 1,000 people every day. Palantir is rolling out its AI-powered “ImmigrationOS,” designed to fuse the private details of millions into a single surveillance grid. These are not accidents or isolated headlines. They are pieces of a larger architecture: a disappearance machine that erases lives quietly while making absence look routine.
The system is not hypothetical. It is funded, operational, and expanding. What began with undocumented immigrants now extends to visa holders, asylum seekers, parolees, aid workers, and dissenters. By the government’s own numbers, more than 20 million people are potentially vulnerable. Many are not accused of crimes at all. They are flagged by association, by proximity, by the digital trails of daily life. And still there is no clear plan for where millions would be sent.
This is not only about immigration. It is about what happens when disappearance becomes policy, not error. It is about how authoritarian systems succeed, not through spectacle alone, but by presenting themselves as orderly, legal, and necessary. History offers its warning: Absence becomes normal, silence becomes institutional. If this machine succeeds, it will not stop with immigrants. It will become the blueprint for domestic control and the silencing of millions.
The Enforcement System
The machine does not announce itself with spectacle. Its danger lies in its efficiency, humming beneath the noise of everyday life. The quotas, contracts, and deployments pile up like the hum of an engine, so constant that many people stop hearing them.
ICE has already blown past its legal detention limits, booking more than 31,000 people in June alone. Overflow has been moved into tent camps on military bases and newly leased private facilities. But the real innovation lies beneath the numbers: the wiring of the system. Department of Motor Vehicle records, school rosters, medical files, protest photos—all are now drawn into ICE’s databases, where AI-driven analytics map not only who people are, but who they know.
That wiring has corporate architects. Palantir. Amazon Web Services. Anduril. Palantir’s AI engines feed the machine with millions of cross-linked records, turning raw fragments into actionable targets. Anduril watches from autonomous towers. Amazon stores the data that makes it possible. Each contract transforms misery into revenue, turning deportation into a line item on a balance sheet. Together they prove a brutal truth: Deportation is not just policy. It is profit.
What binds people to one another—love, kinship, faith, compassion—becomes evidence against them.
Congress has widened the channel further. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” earmarks $170 billion for detention, deportation logistics, and 10,000 new ICE agents. If enacted, ICE would surpass the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Marshals combined budgets and operational reach. Contracts like these rarely expire. Facilities like these rarely close. Permanence is the point, and permanence is the profit.
The military presence seals the fusion. Guard units have been mobilized in 19 states. Marines handle logistics. In Los Angeles, Washington, and other threatened cities, troops now patrol the streets. Each deployment erodes the line between military and civilian. Each step embeds martial presence deeper into ordinary life.
This is the machine. Arrests that exceed the law. Contracts that bind the future. Corporations cashing in. Soldiers on our sidewalks. A van arrives. A door closes. A name disappears. It does not need to announce itself loudly. It hums through budgets, contracts, and signatures. It looks procedural. It looks harmless. And that is the danger.
Silence allows it to run. And what it runs toward is not enforcement, but disappearance.
When Bureaucracy Becomes Disappearance
Once the machine is in motion, it does not deliver justice. It delivers absence. Disappearance is not a malfunction. It is the product the system is built to deliver.
When ICE takes someone, the trail goes dark by design. Families call and hear nothing. Lawyers search and find no records. Facilities deny they are holding anyone. Transfers happen within hours, often across state lines. A man leaves for work and never returns, his vehicle still running, lunch packed, a child’s car seat strapped in. Fields go unharvested, animals untended, trucks unloaded. This is not error. It is method. Not accident. Design.
Authoritarian regimes have long understood this power. Nazi Germany perfected registries, codes, and camps placed far from public view. The parallel is structural, not identical. Then it was files and cattle cars. Today it is biometric databases and chartered flights. What once took days can now be done in seconds with AI-driven servers and algorithms.
This is the innovation: speed. A protest photo flagged. A clinic visit cross-matched. An address linked to a file. Palantir’s AI system merges millions of fragments into real-time triggers. ICE no longer needs loud raids. It can knock softly, often. A van at the corner. A name missing the next day. Absence hardens into fact. Silence hardens into complicity.
The Logic That Criminalizes Connection
This system punishes not only identity but connection. In it, solidarity itself is criminalized. The machine does not only target individuals. It ensnares through association.
If you share an address with someone flagged, your file may be tagged. If your number appears on a church roster, a school list, or a protest sign-in sheet, it can be enough. If you drive a neighbor, open your home, or hand someone food, you may be prosecuted for “harboring.” AI-powered algorithms do not need guilt. They need only connection.
This logic makes solidarity itself dangerous. What binds people to one another—love, kinship, faith, compassion—becomes evidence against them.
We are already seeing it in practice. Arizona volunteers charged for leaving water in the desert. Texas laws making it a felony to drive undocumented neighbors to church. In Florida, vehicles parked near churches or immigrant-serving sites were scanned and flagged by law enforcement using surveillance data accessible to ICE. The ordinary acts of care that sustain community are reclassified as crimes. The message is unmistakable: Kindness itself can put you on the list.
These are not outliers. They are the system. Piece by piece, the fragments form a net.
A Net Cast Over Millions
Public debate still circles around the figure of “11 million undocumented.” But that number is a mirage. The government’s own statistics show a pool of vulnerability far larger.
In fiscal year 2023, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported nearly 400,000 visa overstays. US Citizenship and Immigration Services lists 1.1 million people on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and another 525,000 enrolled in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DHS reports show more than 530,000 parolees admitted from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Executive Office for Immigration Review and Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data confirm over 2 million asylum cases pending and 3.7 million in active removal proceedings. To this must be added parolees from Afghanistan and Ukraine, more than 200,000 new foreign F-1 student visa recipients each year, and several hundred thousand seasonal or temporary workers.
The risk is not only to millions already vulnerable. It is to every one of us, to the very possibility of a society that remembers, that dissents, that refuses to be silent.
Taken together, these categories already exceed 22 million people potentially at risk. And that does not include the at least 4.4 million US-born children in mixed-status households, whose futures hinge on their parents’ deportability.
This is not just a pool of migrants. It is a blueprint: proof of how entire populations can be flagged, managed, and erased.
Most chilling of all, many of these groups—DACA recipients, TPS holders, parolees—were once granted provisional protection. Their status was designed to provide safety, but now those same categories function as easily revoked permissions. What was once stability has become a list. What was once recognition has become a trap.
Quiet Files, Loud Fear
The system works on two levels at once, and the tension is intentional.
It is quiet, bureaucratic, relentless. Arrest. Transfer. Conceal. Data-matched names pulled into custody. People erased without a headline.
It is also loud, theatrical, meant to frighten. Guard patrols in DC. Raids at food pantries and churches. And in the Florida Everglades, a detention complex nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” built in just over a week on an abandoned airstrip. With 200 cameras, miles of barbed wire, and capacity for thousands, the camp was raised almost overnight and showcased as proof of federal resolve. It was not only a camp. It was a message: that human beings can be caged faster than homes can be built. The spectacle was the point: Not only could the government erase, it could do so at speed, in full view.
These displays are not mistakes. They are signals, designed to spread fear.
The precedent is clear. Nazi Germany paired hidden registries with public raids. Bureaucracy made atrocity look like procedure. Spectacle made fear look like power.
The result is devastating. Efficiency makes absence seem administrative. Spectacle makes fear seem permanent. One normalizes disappearance. The other normalizes submission. Like two sides of a coin, the system flips back and forth, but the outcome is always the same.
We’ve Seen This Logic Before
Nazi Germany balanced quiet registries and files with public terror. The paperwork processed millions. The raids displayed the strength of the state.
The parallels here are structural, not identical. Then it was racial laws and household registries; now it is DMV databases and predictive analytics. Then it was cattle cars; now it is charter flights. Then it was propaganda films; now it is press conferences and televised ICE raids.
The point is not to equate outcomes, but to recognize how bureaucracy and spectacle normalize atrocity in slow motion. In Germany, disappearance was accepted because it looked like order—files, trains, uniforms, procedure. The danger now is the same logic in digital form. When arrests are by algorithm, when transfers vanish into databases, when detention is described as “routine,” absence can be made to feel like administration instead of atrocity.
Ordinary Germans tolerated disappearance because it looked like order. That is precisely the risk now: authoritarian disappearance creeping forward one administrative step at a time, while the public is told everything remains under control.
It Starts with Them. It Ends with Us.
What begins with immigrants does not end there. Once a disappearance machine exists, its reach expands outward.
The list is already long: undocumented residents, visa overstays, TPS and DACA recipients, parolees, asylum seekers. Around them ripple aid workers, clergy, family members, volunteers, neighbors. Association is enough.
And the warning is clear: If there is a list, there are many. No one’s record is spotless. To be added requires only an electronic click, a database match, a fragment of data. Protest and your photo may be flagged. Write and your words may be logged. Share a home or a meal, and your act may become evidence. The logic is merciless: No category is safe, no community beyond reach. It does not stop at the border. It does not stop at citizenship.
Nowhere to Send Them, Nowhere to Hide
Two hundred detention sites are already locked into contracts. Offshore deals with countries such as Rwanda and El Salvador, and negotiations with many others, are ongoing. Daily arrests now number over a thousand, with internal targets aiming for 3,000 or more. A deportation system scaled for millions now exists, but the government has offered no clear plan for where those millions would go.
History warns what happens when removal outpaces destination. Nazi Germany built camps faster than authorities could decide what to do with those inside. Bureaucracy outran policy, and atrocity followed. The United States is not there yet, but it is building a machinery of disappearance faster than it can credibly process.
When numbers overwhelm the system, detention becomes indefinite. The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch have documented cases in which migrants were kept in prolonged detention without legal basis, sometimes without access to lawyers or family, effectively leaving them with no country of return or lawful destination. Congressional Research Service reports flag the capacity gap. In practice, that means expanded camps, more offshore transfers, and prolonged detention for those who cannot be removed.
The time to act is not when the machine is finished. It is now, while it is still assembling.
The danger is that a system built in the name of immigration control becomes one of social control. People are held not because they will be deported tomorrow, but because their absence today serves the machine. This is not immigration enforcement. It is the architecture of social control. Giorgio Agamben called this the creation of “bare life”: existence reduced to custody and stripped of political standing. As Hannah Arendt warned, the first loss is political: lose the “right to have rights,” and a “rule by Nobody” normalizes erasure from public life.
What cannot be done is to pretend this is merely immigration policy. What should not be done is to accept disappearance in any form as ordinary. What can still be done is to name the system for what it is, to resist normalization, and to defend the human ties that the machine seeks to criminalize.
The risk is not only to millions already vulnerable. It is to every one of us, to the very possibility of a society that remembers, that dissents, that refuses to be silent.
Before It’s Too Late to Speak
What once seemed unimaginable is quickly becoming routine. Daily arrests in the thousands. Troops on city streets. Contracts that turn human beings into commodities. Each day the machine expands. Each day Americans adjust, telling themselves it is not their concern.
But immigration is not the endgame. It is the cover story. Behind it, a larger project advances. The same AI-powered system that is designed to erase millions will erase dissent. The same silence that excuses raids will excuse repression.
This is how atrocity is normalized: not with sudden rupture, but with forms, files, and procedures that look ordinary until it is too late to resist them. History shows how absence can be made to feel like order, and how silence can become institutional.
The time to act is not when the machine is finished. It is now, while it is still assembling. Before the erasure of those targeted becomes irreversible. Before mass erasure becomes routine. History will not care about our excuses. It will remember our silence as complicity. It will ask not whether we knew, but whether we spoke.
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Fashion Death: The War Machine Now Has Merch
Celebrating weapons makers, even with a nod and a wink, serves to normalize the U.S. role as the world’s premier arms producer while ignoring the consequences of that status.
Jul 17, 2025
I wrote a book about Lockheed Martin — the world’s largest arms-making conglomerate. But even I was surprised to learn that for a number of years now, they have also been involved in the fashion industry.
The revelation came in a recent New York Times piece on Kodak, which has had a minor resurgence, not by selling its own products, but by selling its name for use on a range of consumer products, produced by other firms, from luggage to eyewear to hoodies and t-shirts.
Deeper into the article it was mentioned in passing that Lockheed Martin had been doing the same. It linked to another article that noted that Lockheed Martin-branded cargo pants and hoodies have been a hit in South Korea since they were introduced a few years back. Brisk sales are continuing, with the Lockheed brand adorning streetwear with slogans like “Ensuring those we serve always stay ahead of ready.” One blue t-shirt dons the outline of an F-35 on the back, emblazoned with the motto “The F-35 strengthens national security, enhances global partnerships and powers economic growth.” It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but at least it’s free advertising.
Lockheed Martin’s efforts at reputation laundering come at a moment when many arms industry leaders are vocally supporting — even applauding — armed violence.
Not to be outdone, emerging tech firms are selling limited edition fashion lines of their own. Palantir recently dropped a line of hats and tees that quickly sold out. Eliano Younes, Head of Strategic Engagement for Palantir, has noted that when they re-launched the Palantir shop that “the site almost crashed within four minutes.” And Anduril has partnered with Reyn Spooner to launch a limited drop of Hawaiian shirts — a favorite uniform of company founder Palmer Luckey.
Not everyone welcomes the entry of weapons makers into the fashion world. A critic of Lockheed’s apparel line who goes by the name of Opal noted, “They stopped killing people for just a minute to help them kill those looks . . . The people who made these decisions are either so out of touch or like unbelievably acutely aware of what’s going on, and I can’t really tell the difference.”
As Opal fears, the marriage of fashion and weapons makers may be a sign of the times, as shoppers welcome the entrance of arms makers into the consumer sector rather than seeing their foray into fashion as an exercise in poor taste. This is probably because military firms and the weapons they produce are so deeply embedded in our culture that many people view the companies as purveyors of neat technology while ignoring the devastating consequences that occur when those weapons are actually used.
Lockheed Martin’s efforts at reputation laundering come at a moment when many arms industry leaders are vocally supporting — even applauding — armed violence. Prominent Silicon Valley military tech executives like Luckey and Palantir CEO Alex Karp, have no compunction about glorifying war while their companies are paid handsome sums to build the tools needed to carry it out. Luckey, the 32-year old head of the military tech firm Anduril, asserts that “Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited by enacting violence in pursuit of good aims.” He didn’t discuss who gets to decide what “good aims” are, or why being “excited” about killing fellow human beings could ever be a good thing.
And Karp held his company’s board meeting in Israel at the height of the Gaza war to cheer on Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter. At the time of the meeting, the company’s Executive VP Josh Harris announced that “Both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions. This strategic partnership aims to significantly aid the Israeli Ministry of Defense in addressing the current situation.”
These attitudes contrast with the efforts of old school arms company leaders like former Lockheed Martin CEO Norman Augustine, who was a master at burnishing the image of his company while downplaying its role as a primary producer of weapons at war.
Augustine led by personal example, working closely with the Boy Scouts and the Red Cross, championing science education, and speaking regularly of the need for corporate ethics, which he seemed to equate mostly with acts of charity by company employees, not with grappling with moral questions about how his company’s weapons were being used.
To a lesser degree, Augustine’s approach continues to this day. Company press releases describe Lockheed Martin as a firm that is “driving innovation and advancing scientific discovery.” The company’s image-building efforts include support for scholarships in STEM education, funding programs to build and upgrade facilities serving veterans, supporting food banks and disaster response programs, and more. There’s nothing wrong with helping fund a good cause, but it shouldn’t be allowed to obscure the company’s other activities.
The weapons produced by Lockheed Martin have fueled the war in Gaza, and they were integral to Saudi Arabia’s brutal war in Yemen, an effort that included bombing funerals, a school bus, hospitals, civilian markets and water treatment plants in Yemen, in a war that cost nearly 400,000 lives through the direct and indirect means, from indiscriminate bombing the the enforcement of a blockade the hindered imports of food and medical supplies.
On the rare occasions that arms industry executives are asked about the human impacts of their products, they usually say they are only doing what the government allows. They fail to mention that they spend large sums of money and effort trying to shape government policy, making it easier to rush weapons to foreign clients without adequate consideration of their possible uses in aggressive wars or systematic repression.
Given all of this, Lockheed Martin’s endorsement of a line of street clothing seems like a relatively harmless side show. But celebrating weapons makers, even with a nod and a wink, serves to normalize the U.S. role as the world’s premier arms producer while ignoring the consequences of that status.
America needs to be able to defend itself and its allies, but celebrating war and preparations for war is not the way to do it. We need more reflection and less celebration. And we need to call weapons makers what they are, not welcome the use of their names as marketing tools designed to sell consumer products.
The real question as we try to dig ourselves out of a period of devastating wars and increasing global tension is whether we need huge weapons firms like Lockheed Martin at all, or if there is a more efficient, humane way to provide for the common defense, less focused on profit and PR and more focused on developing the tools actually needed to carry out a more rational, restrained defense strategy.
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