The early January launch of Chinese startup DeepSeek’s Artificial Intelligence models, which rival, if not outright eclipse, the capabilities of all current industry leaders at a negligible fraction of the cost, has been widely hailed by Western news outlets as a revolutionary disruption of the U.S.-dominated tech world order. Hundreds of billions have been shaved off American AI giant Nvidia’s stock price. Silicon Valley is frenziedly imploring Donald Trump to take decisive action and regain Washington’s “strategic advantage” in the sphere.
The Trump administration can only be a receptive audience to such entreaties. In fact, the loudest and most determined pleading to beat Beijing in the global battle for AI supremacy will be emanating from individuals and organizations in intimate proximity to the President, up to and including members of his new cabinet. While unacknowledged in the mainstream, Trump is, one way or another, surrounded by people with extensive financial, ideological and political interests in AI products and applications to a marked degree.
For example, Trump’s confirmed CIA director, John Ratcliffe, has for years sat on the board of and consulted for multiple AI firms with Pentagon contracts extending to billions. This includes Arctop, which uses Artificial Intelligence to “interpret brain signals to seamlessly translate thoughts into speech and digital actions” and currently has a $1.25 million contract with the U.S. Air Force to monitor the brain activity of cadets in training.
Moreover, from 2021-2022, Ratcliffe consulted for Shield AI. In the second year of his employment, the company received a $950 million Air Force contract to use Artificial Intelligence to pilot unmanned drones. The CIA has secretly long-exploited such tech to run its targeted assassination programs the world over. Shield AI isn’t the only company to which Ratcliffe is linked offering these services, and his nomination disclosure to the Senate links him to half a dozen companies inextricably tied to the Military Industrial Complex.
In that document, the CIA chief declares “none” of his business dealings could represent any conflict of interest with his new role or even “appear” to. Ratcliffe’s unconvincing denials are particularly difficult to reconcile with Trump announcing on January 23—the second day of his second term in office—a $500 billion AI initiative, Stargate. Under its auspices, 20 large AI data centers will be constructed in the U.S. by 2029, managed by a consortium of major private Artificial Intelligence firms and financial institutions.
Forbes branded the move “monumental,” aimed at reinforcing Washington’s “position as the undisputed global leader” in AI. However, DeepSeek’s launch, which saw the app almost instantly catapulted to the world’s top-rated, most-downloaded free app, demonstrated AI primacy can be achieved without vast computing power or mammoth public or private investment. Its ChatGPT killer took two months and under $6 million to build. Even the mainstream media acknowledged that DeepSeek threatened Stargate’s future before the project even took root.
It is indeed no coincidence then that DeepSeek has been subject to relentless cyberattacks since launch. Chinese state media has referred to this blitzkrieg – which shows no sign of slowing, only escalating – as a “massive brute-force” strike originating from “US IP addresses.” Given Ratcliffe’s background and new CIA position, Trump significantly loosening restrictions on Agency cyberattacks during his first term, and his administration’s dark handshake with AI giants, one wonders how many of those IP addresses are based in Langley, Virginia.
‘Best Behavior’
One of the Artificial Intelligence firms set to deliver Stargate is OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. Its CEO Sam Altman has long been fawned over in the Western media as a key leader of the AI boom, a September 2023 New York Magazine profile comparing him to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atom bomb. At the White House press conference kickstarting Stargate, he stood beaming next to Trump before delivering an address of his own. He boldly declared: “This will be the most important project of this era…We wouldn’t be able to do this without you, Mr. President, and I’m thrilled that we get to.”
Such effusive praise is in stark contrast to 2016 when Altman spent much of the year comparing Trump to Adolf Hitler and imploring U.S. citizens to vote for Hillary Clinton. Subsequently, he donated sizable sums to Democratic party causes and candidates, including $200,000 to Joe Biden. Eerily, his sudden political volte-face coincided with a prominent appearance at a July 2024 AI for Good conference. There, Altman made a number of deeply disquieting comments, chief among them:
Over a long period of time…I [expect] there will be some change required to the social contract, given how powerful we expect [Artificial Intelligence] to be. I’m not a believer that there won’t be any jobs, I think we always find new things to do. But I do think the whole structure of society itself will be up for some degree of debate and reconfiguration.”
Altman’s forecast sparked widespread concern he and fellow AI innovators were seeking to harness the unprecedented power of their patented technology for malign, world-changing ends. Yet, his dire projection pales compared to the routine utterances of Larry Ellison, chief of Oracle, the other major tech firm at Stargate’s forefront. While little-known, the company is one of the world’s biggest and most profitable tech players, reaping untold billions from contracts with U.S. government agencies over decades, the CIA being its most profitable customer.
Oracle’s foray into AI is a relatively new development, but Ellison – the world’s fourth-richest man, per Bloomberg – has grand, dystopian plans for the technology and no compunction whatsoever about broadcasting these designs publicly. At a September 2024 investor meeting, he bragged that artificial intelligence could be used to perpetually monitor every conceivable public and private surveillance system, from CCTV to vehicle dashboard cameras. Ellison also foresaw AI-powered drones replacing police cars in high-speed chases – “very simple in the age of autonomous drones”:
“We’re going to have supervision…at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
‘Technically Simple’
At the January 23 White House Stargate presser, Ellison laid out an entirely novel use for AI – its application to healthcare, in the form of rapid-response mRNA vaccines for grave ailments, particularly cancer. He ominously dubbed Oracle’s research and development in this field “one of the most exciting things we’re working on.” Ellison claimed Artificial Intelligence analysis of simple blood test results could produce “early detection” of major afflictions, then prescribe appropriate vaccines accordingly:
Once we gene-sequence that cancer tumor, you can then vaccinate the person, design a vaccine for every individual person to vaccinate them against that cancer…You can make that vaccine, that mRNA vaccine, you can make that robotically again using AI in about 48 hours…Imagine early cancer detection, the development of a cancer vaccine for your particular cancer aimed at you…This is the promise of AI and the promise of the future.”
MRNA vaccines remain highly controversial within the scientific community and are authorized purely for “emergency use” in the U.S. and elsewhere. This is without factoring in Oracle’s long-running ties to the CIA, an organization that has previously employed bogus vaccination campaigns for spying operations and regime change efforts. Indeed, the company’s very name is drawn from an Agency project that Ellison worked on as a contractor in the 1970s.
As Oracle sells its products and services to businesses and governments rather than regular citizens, its operations typically fly under the mainstream radar. Yet, the company’s tendrils extend unseen and unknown into every conceivable sphere of public, political, and even daily life, with countless consumer-facing businesses, government entities, and educational facilities relying on the firm’s database software.
Ellison is not only intensely relaxed about Oracle collating such swaths of sensitive private data, he considers this trove his firm’s unique selling point. In 2004, Ellison boasted:
The Oracle database is used to keep track of basically everything. The information about your banks, your checking balance, your savings balance, is stored in an Oracle database. Your airline reservation is stored in an Oracle database. What books you bought on Amazon is stored in an Oracle database. Your profile on Yahoo! is stored in an Oracle database…Privacy is already gone.”
Since Oracle’s birth, Ellison has been a firm believer in governments maintaining voluminous data on their citizens. The 9/11 attacks afforded him the opportunity to shill this proposal publically. In January 2002, he authored an op-ed for The New York Times calling for the introduction of a “single national security database” in the U.S. This centralized system would combine “biometrics, thumb prints, hand prints [and] iris scans”:
The single greatest step we Americans could take to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was copied into a single, comprehensive national security database…Creating such a database is technically simple. All we have to do is copy information from the hundreds of separate law enforcement databases into a single database. A national security database could be built in a few months.”
Two months after 9/11, Oracle recruited CIA high-ranker David Carney, after 32 years of service at the Agency, to pitch this proposal to governments worldwide. Carney remarked that the attacks “made business a bit easier” – previously, “you pretty much had to hype the threat and the problem” to engage public and private sector clients. After the Twin Towers collapsed however, “they clamor for it!” To this day, Oracle actively seeks to headhunt CIA veterans and DC insiders to its ranks for lobbying purposes.
Already, Oracle hoards vast amounts of information on private citizens within the U.S. and beyond without their express knowledge. Adding personal health data to this bloated corpus would provide a welter of hitherto uncharted opportunities for surveillance and social control to a largely unaccountable, opaque organization with a sordid history of corruption and effective bribery to further its business interests. Exacerbating matters further, cybersecurity experts have long argued that Oracle’s databases aren’t at all secure and easily compromised by state and non-state actors.
MintPress staff writer Alan Macleod, who has reported on Ellison extensively, comments with some unease at how Ellison “keeps finding new ways to make the world a substantially worse place.” He brands AI-powered vaccines “just the latest in a long line of bad ideas” the oligarch has sought to push upon the world for his own personal profit and the public’s detriment:
Considering the mess that AI has created in the world of image creation or search engines, why anyone would think the technology is ready to be used in life and death situations is beyond me. Ellison’s incredibly close ties to both the CIA and the Israeli government are just one more reason he should not be trusted with our most sensitive health data.”
‘Analytical Tools’
Strikingly, Oracle’s diversification into AI came after the first Trump administration employed its services for Operation Warp Speed, the “public-private partnership” that created and delivered COVID-19 vaccines to the U.S. population. From the outset, OWS was replete with an alarming surveillance component. As the Operation’s chief and Big Pharma journeyman Moncef Slaoui stated, vaccine recipients would be surveilled via “incredibly precise” tracking systems. The ostensible purpose was to ensure they got both vaccine doses and monitor potential “adverse health effects.”
As former MintPress staffer and independent journalist Whitney Webb notes, this is where Oracle came in. She suggests the company’s involvement in the project—“celebrated by futurists” as ushering in a new era in which “internal surveillance will be combined with external surveillance”—has precipitated “an unprecedented era of authoritarianism.” Webb further adds that the combination of AI infrastructure with biotech represents an expansion of the U.S. global surveillance state “into the final frontier: the human body.”
Oracle didn’t once publicly discuss its role in OWS. How much the firm reaped in federal contracts for their work on the project, and the details of these deals, never emerged via open source records either. Meanwhile, Slaoui’s explanations of what COVID-19 vaccination tracking entailed were opaque and variable, although, in October 2020, he referred to a “very active pharmacovigilance surveillance system.” Similar language featured in a contemporary U.S. Department of Health and Human Services document:
The long-term safety of these vaccines will be carefully assessed using pharmacovigilance surveillance…The key objective of pharmacovigilance is to determine each vaccine’s performance in real-life scenarios, to study efficacy, and to discover any infrequent and rare side effects not identified in clinical trials. OWS will also use pharmacovigilance analytics, which serves as one of the instruments for the continuous monitoring of pharmacovigilance data. Robust analytical tools will be used to leverage large amounts of data.”
What became of this tranche and how it was “leveraged” has never been revealed. Oracle’s role in OWS has been almost completely forgotten today, as has that of notorious Palantir, founded by hardcore Trump supporter Peter Thiel. The company, like Oracle, has expanded its operations into AI considerably in recent years – and likewise stands to profit handsomely from Trump’s re-election. Thiel’s close associate Jim O’Neill, a longstanding advocate of healthcare deregulation, is tapped to serve as deputy HHS secretary under Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Palantir’s spying and security products, which in many cases purport to provide predictive capabilities to prevent crimes before they happen, have long been controversial. This consternation has only ratcheted in recent years as the company forcefully infiltrates public health services across the Western world, explicitly applying its “pre-crime” model to medical emergencies. With O’Neill in such an influential post, it seems all but inevitable any and all barriers to Palantir’s penetration of public health will be demolished. Whitney Webb concludes:
The push for experimental biotech combined with deregulation offers the surveillance state a major opportunity to expand its scope, as well as the types of data it mines. Surveilling the internal and external landscape of Americans is manifesting in other ways. Trump admin nominees and appointments seek to end efficacy testing for mRNA vaccine products and replace those with ;biosurveillance’, where products like digital wearables will be used to track how untested products impact the human body. This data will be sent both to drug companies and HHS contractors that are also intelligence community mass surveillance providers like Palantir.”
‘Perilous Times’
As MacLeod observed, Oracle’s AI ambitions are all the more disturbing given the firm’s intimate relationship with the military, security and intelligence structures not only of the U.S. but other belligerent, imperial powers – foremost among them, Israel. As MintPress has previously documented, Oracle’s top brass are unabashed about their commitment to supporting the Zionist entity and Israeli Occupation Forces. In August 2021, at the opening of a new Oracle data center in Jerusalem, the company’s Israel-born CEO Safra Catz declared:
Our commitment to Israel is second to none…[if our employees] don’t agree with our mission to support the state of Israel, then maybe we aren’t the right company for them. Larry [Ellison] and I are publicly committed to Israel and devote personal time to the country, and no one should be surprised by that.”
Ellison has personally financed Israeli occupation for years. In 2007, he pledged half a million dollars to support illegal settlement expansion. Seven years later, Ellison gifted $10 million to the Friends of the IDF (FIDF). Then, in 2017, he gave a further $16.6 million, the largest single donation the organization has ever received, to bankroll the construction of a new training facility for Tel Aviv’s infantry units. At a concomitant fundraising gala, Ellison gushed:
For 2,000 years, we were a stateless people, but now we have a country we can call our own. Through all of the perilous times since Israel’s founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home…I thank FIDF for allowing us to celebrate and support these soldiers year after year. We should do all we can to show these heroic soldiers that they are not alone.”
Ellison also counts Benjamin Netanyahu as a uniquely close personal friend. In September 2021, with the longtime Israeli leader out of power and investigations into his industrial-scale corruption in high office kicking into full gear, the Oracle chief flew Netanyahu to his private Hawaiian island, offering him a seat on his company’s board, with an annual salary of $450,000. This followed Netanyahu urging Ellison to purchase the opposition newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth and transform it into a pro-Likud propaganda megaphone.
Prior investigations by MintPress have detailed how Trump’s administration holds the ignominious distinction of being the most pro-Israeli in U.S. history. Every key post is filled with fanatical adherents to the Zionist cause. Now, that same government seeks to regain “strategic advantage” over China in Artificial Intelligence, with the assistance of OpenAI and Oracle, a CIA-adjacent data harvester led by a brazen financier of Tel Aviv’s worst, genocidal excesses with a worrying history in the field of healthcare. What could possibly go wrong?
Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News
Kit Klarenberg is an investigative journalist and MintPress News contributor exploring the role of intelligence services in shaping politics and perceptions. His work has previously appeared in The Cradle, Declassified UK, and Grayzone. Follow him on Twitter @KitKlarenberg.