Silicon Valley’s tech titans descended on Washington this week for the Hill and Valley Forum, an all-day event created to bridge the gap between the government and the tech industry.
Startup executives, billionaire investors, and government officials alike waited in lines winding down Constitution Avenue to strike deals and hear from guest speakers like Palantir executive Shyam Sankar and Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-La.). “Welcome to the superbowl of defense tech,” said the first investor I encountered in the lobby.
Throughout the day, speakers from the Hill (Capitol Hill) indicated their enthusiasm about reducing regulation while speakers from the Valley (Silicon Valley) promised industrial strength. The Hill and Valley fusion has proved fruitful in the first year of the Trump administration, racking up wins like industry-friendly weapons acquisition reform , increased investment in drones, and accelerated military deployment of artificial intelligence.
But for a crowd heavily invested in defense and artificial intelligence, there was relatively little talk at the Hill and Valley Forum of America’s war with Iran. Judging by the day’s proceedings, one can’t help but conclude that Silicon Valley’s founders are far more comfortable talking tough and wargaming a confrontation with China than tying their mission to an actual hot war in the Middle East that has a rising death toll and no clear exit strategy.
Still, there were moments. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, said that he is optimistic about the future of the Middle East despite the war with Iran, saying Israel, the U.S., the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Qatar are committed to lasting peace. “They’ve realized they need permanent peace, they can’t have neighbors that lob missiles into their data centers,” Dimon claimed.
Sankar, the Chief Operating Officer of Palantir, called for the Pentagon to experiment more with new weapons systems, even if some will fail. “This [Iran war] is the ultimate exercise, reality is the ultimate exercise,” he said. “We should be fielding 154 different LUCAS (low-cost uncrewed combat attack system) variants now, to see which ten are going to fuck up the adversary.”
None of the day’s 25 sessions were dedicated to Iran — a notable absence given that many of the companies present are deeply embedded in the war. The U.S. military has employed Palantir’s Maven, which uses AI to classify targets and recommend weapons systems for strikes. Anthropic’s Claude is embedded in Maven’s system, helping prioritize targets and draft automated legal justifications for each strike.
The growing use of this tech prompted 166 lawmakers to sign onto letters asking the Pentagon if artificial intelligence was used as part of the strike on the girls elementary school in Minab that killed 180 children. The Pentagon is currently carrying out a formal investigation into the Minab strike, which is expected to take several months.
As I wandered through the lobby, I tried to get a read on what Silicon Valley’s founders privately thought of the Iran war. Several said that the Iran war could be executed for much cheaper before handing me their business cards. Others pointed to the effectiveness of the Iranian military’s Shahed drones, saying the U.S. needs to invest more in similar low-cost weapons.
Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, insisted that the key lesson from the Iran War is the importance of striking hard from the start. “You can cripple air defenses and a lot of defensive capabilities very rapidly,” Maguire told RS. “I think that is the lesson we need to internalize and take to other theaters.”
But other attendees said the shock-and-awe campaign in Iran was just a distraction from America’s main adversary: China. It is not lost on these contractors that the U.S. and Israel have expended over 11,000 munitions in Iran and are rapidly depleting munitions stockpiles.
“If the U.S. is sending its munitions stockpile to the Middle East, that undercuts deterrence in the Pacific,” one weapons company founder told me. “Plus,” he added, “there’s not one example of a successful regime change operation done through air power alone.”
In any case, the Pentagon has made clear that it doesn't want to hear from industry about how to use its weapons. The Tuesday event came amid a growing rift between Silicon Valley darling Anthropic, which wants to restrict the military's use of its technology, and the Pentagon, which bristles at the idea of a private company dictating terms. Early on in the day, Trae Stephens, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Anduril, gave a fiery speech which appeared directed at the feud.
“There is nothing wrong with abstaining from working with the government, but we must all realize there is no moral neutrality in that decision,” Stephens said. “The moment the government accedes to the demands of tech is the moment that the character of our country irreversibly changes.”
Anthropic does not want the military to use its AI tool Claude for mass surveillance or autonomous lethal weapons that carry out strikes without a human in the loop. In response, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has deemed Anthropic a supply chain risk, cutting off the company from working with all military contractors. According to reports, however, Claude is still being used for targeting in Iran.
Stephens pointed to software engineers pushing back on Palantir’s Project Maven and autonomous weaponry in the 2010s, claiming that some of the tech establishment helped enable principal adversaries like China to become “stronger, richer and more emboldened than ever.” The Anduril co-founder was also critical of the government, claiming it must do better at communicating its policies and understanding the tech world. But much of the blame, he said, was on tech companies trying to “score points with the public” by staying away from controversial issues like war.
In the lobby outside the auditorium, some investors and executives said the Pentagon is going too far. “They [Anthropic] should not be blacklisted, it’s ridiculous,” said an executive at a company that makes technology for AI data centers. “Especially because AI is becoming such a powerful weapon.”
The Pentagon’s punitive measures against Anthropic alarmed many tech executives, who have been fretting about their own investments in Anthropic, the precedent these measures set, or both. Some tech employees have filed amicus briefs in support of Anthropic’s right to set limits on the use of their technology. The government, after all, is just another client.
But the government also happens to be a client that holds the keys to major defense contracts on projects like Golden Dome, which will likely be worth hundreds of billions. An executive at a venture capital firm invested in defense technology startups explained that companies have been relatively muted in their public criticisms because they want to protect their honeymoon with the Trump administration. “If it were another administration, they might be speaking a little louder,” she told me.
I asked the weapons contractor executive if he sees it as his role to weigh in on how his product is used. “I’m not sure if it’s my place to say,” he demurred.
If Silicon Valley’s leading China hawks are worried that another war in the Middle East will bog down resources and set back timelines for building up deterrence for a potential conflict in the Pacific, they aren’t saying so publicly. In fact, at Hill and Valley, they didn’t want to talk much about Iran at all.