As lawmakers demand Congress put artificial intelligence safeguards in place amid new warnings from AI whistleblowers, the Trump administration is using a new, obscure office to do exactly the opposite.
The agency, which is dedicated to turning the U.S. military into an “ AI-first warfighting force ,” is staffed by alumni of Amazon, Palantir, Meta, and Salesforce. All firms that are at the center of the government’s AI contracting boom and which have the most to gain from the minimal implementation of AI safeguards.
The Department of Defense founded the little-known Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) in 2022 when it merged multiple offices, including the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, the Defense Digital Service, and the Chief Data Officer, into a single entity. It now leads all things AI at the Pentagon, from “the development and deployment of algorithmic warfare” and drafting AI-related policy to helping guide the procurement of AI systems from private contractors like Amazon and Palantir.
Under President Donald Trump, the CDAO has focused on integrating AI systems into weapons, combat decisions, surveillance regimes, and target identification processes.
Some of these CDAO-managed military “ capabilities ” helped select the 13,000 targets bombed in the first 38 days of Donald Trump’s ongoing war against Iran. One thousand were struck in the first 24 hours alone . Those so-called “ targets ” included civilian infrastructure .
Several members of the CDAO’s leadership, responsible for helping decide which companies nab multimillion-dollar defense contracts and what safety guardrails will be enforced for them, have passed through the D.C. revolving door from tech industry C-suites. It’s common practice for such employees to receive equity as part of their compensation, enabling them to profit from the company’s growth, though The Lever could not verify whether CDAO employees hold equity in their former firms. Now, the former corporate colleagues of these Big Tech alums are among those poised to profit most from the Trump administration’s push to streamline AI procurement, accelerate AI adoption, and defang basic AI safeguards.
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Amazon Alum At The Helm
Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer Cameron Stanley currently leads the CDAO.
Stanley started his career as an Air Force Lieutenant before spending several years in the private sector, including at global consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, a massive federal contractor. Then, after a multiyear stint focused on military technology and artificial intelligence at the Defense Department ending in 2024, Stanley decamped to Amazon Web Services, a division of Amazon that provides on-demand cloud computing, before rejoining the government in 2026 .
Stanley’s most recent former employer has fared extraordinarily well under the Trump administration. Amazon Web Services is one of the CDAO’s approved Tradewinds Solutions Marketplace vendors, which offers fast-tracked procurement pathways to Pentagon customers, and the Amazon subsidiary has raked in a number of other federal contracts in the first two years of Trump’s second term.
Per publicly available spending data, which excludes classified programs and other exempted awards, Amazon Web Services earned at least $277 million from defense contracts in fiscal year 2025, and it has collected another $358 million in Pentagon spending so far in fiscal year 2026.
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Following the Defense Department’s dispute with Anthropic over basic AI deployment safeguards, Amazon was also one of eight tech companies to secure a deal with the Pentagon to deploy its frontier AI models in classified military capacities for all “lawful operational use[s].”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has requested clarification from the agency and the companies (including Amazon) regarding what, exactly, “lawful operational use” means, and whether these companies have essentially gifted Donald Trump the ability to use AI to “engage in domestic surveillance — including spying on U.S. citizens exercising their legal rights — or [to] build autonomous weapons systems that have enormous power to make decisions about targeting without human intervention.”
Amazon Web Services also plays a role in the Palantir-led and CDAO-managed Project Maven (now known as the Maven Smart System), an AI-integration system designed to accelerate the so-called “kill chain” from target identification to destruction in just “ four clicks .” Integrating large language learning models into Project Maven means the system can now target up to 5,000 objectives a day.
Project Maven, whose Pentagon contract is worth up to $1.3 billion , is now being “repurposed for border control and drug policing at home,” according to The New Yorker .
Palantir’s Inside Man
Stanley isn’t the only public official who came to CDAO from a company with a stake in Project Maven. Rob Malpass, who previously worked at Palantir, is now the CDAO’s Deputy Chief Digital and AI Officer of the Intelligence Mission Area.
Malpass is also a Trump-world nepo baby. He is the son of David Malpass, a longtime Trump ally who served in the U.S. Treasury Department during Trump’s first term and subsequently led the World Bank from 2019 to 2023. The younger Malpass spent nearly a year working under his father at the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, where the staff was reportedly told to give him “preferential treatment.” Leaked audio revealed that bank staff referred to the 22-year-old “as a ‘prince’ and ‘important little fellow,’ who could go ‘running to daddy’ if things went wrong,” according to The Guardian .
Malpass left his father’s side to join Trump’s first National Economic Council in 2019 before moving to Palantir in 2021.
Like Amazon Web Services, Palantir has also been one of the top government contractors to benefit from the second Trump administration. In 2025, the Army awarded the company almost $10 billion to establish “a comprehensive framework for the Army’s future software and data needs” over the next decade. It is one of the largest Pentagon contracts ever delivered. And $700.7 million of that has been earmarked to support the CDAO’s Managed Service Solution for DOD.
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Ties To Meta And Salesforce
Another AI industry insider, CDAO Chief of Staff Kaydee James, joined the office after a stint as chief of staff at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, which wielded AI tools to “ delete ” federal contracts and workflows, fire staff, and surveil government workers .
Previously, from 2021 to 2023, James worked at Meta, one of the many Big Tech firms going “ all in ” on AI. In 2025, Meta dumped $14.3 billion into an AI infrastructure company called Scale AI in exchange for a 49 percent ownership stake. Last year, the Pentagon contracted with Scale AI to provide “our warfighters and mission operators with cutting-edge AI tools.” In May, CDAO expanded Scale AI’s contract ceiling from $100 million to a whopping $500 million potential over the lifetime of the award.
Before her time at Meta, James worked at Salesforce. The cloud-based customer relationship management giant won a 10-year Army contract worth $5.6 billion this past January.
Billion-Dollar Windfalls
All told, Trump’s federal government — and the AI insiders it’s hired — have spent the first years of Trump 2.0 propping up what looks to be an AI bubble of gargantuan proportions through deregulation, hundreds of billions of dollars in federal contracts, as well as direct and hidden public subsidies.
Indeed, the Brookings Institution, a nonprofit public policy organization, found that federal spending on AI-related contracts rose to $7.2 billion in 2026, up 966 percent compared to 2024. What’s more, the value of potential awards has soared to $91.8 billion, a 1,912 percent jump from just two years earlier.
Much of that windfall has been overseen by the industry alums helming the CDAO. But the office and its corporate ties could now face scrutiny if lawmakers follow through with their promises to curb the AI gold rush. Following insider warnings that AI companies are “gambling with our lives,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) pushed a sweeping AI safety bill, saying “we need to pass the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Bill asap.” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), meanwhile, announced he’ll be introducing legislation “to ban superintelligence and pause AI development.”
While the public waits for Congress to implement basic safeguards against the terrifying warnings that continue to emerge from industry whistleblowers, AI companies — thanks, in part, to their former colleagues now in government — just keep cashing in.
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Aggregated summary from an independent source. Read the original at LeverNews.