Academia, Big Tech, and the military are caught in a sordid love triangle — and their love language is money.

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For part five of Computer Says Kill, researcher David Widder describes the powerful trifecta that is academia, Big Tech, and the US military: all of them need each other to survive, but who is benefiting the most? Half of Carnegie Mellon’s research funding comes from the DoW or the DHS — and David will explain how it’s being used to both prop up war apparatus, and serve as an on-ramp to Big Tech platforms.

Further reading & resources:

• It’s about power: What ethical concerns do software engineers have, and what do they (feel they can) do about them? — David Widder et al, June 2023
• Basic Research, Lethal Effects: Military AI Research Funding as Enlistment — David Widder et al
• Open (For Business): Big Tech, Concentrated Power, and the Political Economy of Open AI — David Widder, Sarah West, Meredith Whittaker, August 2023 
• To Build Our Future, We Must Know Our Past: Contextualizing Paradigm Shifts in Natural Language Processing — Sireesh Gururaja, Amanda Bertsch, Clara Na, David Widder, Emma Strubell, December 2023
• What Tech Calls Thinking by Adrian Daub
• The Undone Computer Science Conference
• Computer-vision research powers surveillance technology — Nature Magazine, June 2025
• What’s happening in Memphis with Anthropic? — The Maybe Media

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Computer Says Maybe is produced by Georgia Iacovou, Kushal Dev, Marion Wellington, Sarah Myles, Van Newman, and Zoe Trout