The Shark Tank Guy Is Building a $100 Billion AI Machine Called ARMY

Musk named his after the movie computer that enslaves mankind. Zuckerberg named his after the fallen angels. What are these tech bros really building?

Answer me one question before you read another word. How much more convenient does your life need to get?

Think about it. Your phone talks. Your car navigates. The AI that exists RIGHT NOW, today, the stuff you can use for free, writes emails and reads medical scans and translates forty languages while you eat a sandwich. Useful. Fine. I use it. Nobody sane is against a tool.

So when the richest men alive tell you they need trillions of dollars, entire state power grids, and lakes’ worth of drinking water to build something a thousand times stronger, ask them the question they never answer. Stronger for WHAT? What chore in your house requires a machine smarter than the whole human race put together?

Nothing. There is no chore. Convenience was never the product, and even Tucker Carlson has figured that out now. He spent this spring walking Kevin O’Leary through crime stats on national broadcast, watched the surveillance-makes-you-safe argument fall apart in real time, and landed on the sentence I’ve been getting called a lunatic for since 2023: “the real reason is to make you obedient, obviously.”

I’d love to enjoy the vindication. I gave up a comfortable tech career for this. I’ve eaten three years of death threats, one burglary, and a lot of very confident strangers explaining that I’m crazy, and now the biggest broadcaster in America is reading from chapter four of my back catalog. But vindication is worthless if the thing you warned about gets finished anyway, so let me say the whole thesis out loud, the part even Tucker won’t touch yet.

A handful of tech billionaires, and the politicians they openly purchased, are building an artificial superintelligence along with the surveillance grid and the robot weapons it will run, and the end of that road is the enslavement of ordinary people. Yours. Your kids’. These men are not geniuses. They are mediocrities with venture funding who have never once faced a consequence, and they are wiring up a bomb they cannot defuse because they’ve convinced themselves the bomb works for them. I can prove they know what they’re building, too. They keep writing it on the buildings.

We’ll get to the buildings. First you need to see what this crowd does with the weak little baby AI they already have, because a man who abuses a rental car should not be handed a fighter jet.

What They Do With the Training Wheels

Flock Safety runs license plate cameras in over 5,000 American communities. Twenty billion scans a month, every one searchable by basically any cop in the country, no warrant, ever. We published a full investigation two weeks ago (”Go Flock Yourself,” still up, send it to your mother) calling the network the skeleton of an American social credit system. Then Tucker devoted an entire episode to Flock and confirmed the whole file.

Start with the daycare. The Marcus Jewish Community Center near Atlanta shared its indoor security feeds with police in case of an antisemitic attack. A decent, sane precaution. Except sharing with police meant sharing with Flock, and audit records dug up by researcher Benn Jordan show Flock employees, private company men, no badges, no warrants, no reason, pulled up those indoor cameras more than a THOUSAND times. The pool. The daycare. The children’s gymnastics room. Grown men. A thousand views.

The company’s explanation was that it was a product demo.

A thousand views of a children’s gymnastics room, and Flock’s explanation is that it was a product demo. Demo for WHO?

Nobody was fired. Nobody was charged. The men scrubbed their LinkedIn pages and one of them deleted his band’s Facebook, and Flock kept marching toward its IPO. And when Jordan found Flock police login credentials for sale on a RUSSIAN dark web market, because the accounts lacked the two-factor security your Netflix has, two members of Congress wrote the FTC calling it a national security emergency. That was a year ago. The FTC did nothing. Of course it did nothing. Which brings us to the part everybody alludes to and nobody says.

This is corruption. Plain, old-fashioned, envelope-of-cash corruption with a software subscription attached. Jordan went down Flock’s LinkedIn roster and found the revolving door spinning like a turbine: the company’s head of communications was a Dallas police officer, and a year before joining Flock he was the guy inside the department pushing the Flock contract. Same pattern with city hall staffers around the country. Cops and officials approve the surveillance contract, then go work for the surveillance company. In any other industry we’d call that a kickback with extra steps. In this one we call it a career path.

And the man at the top, founder Garrett Langley, a billionaire in a t-shirt whose entire fortune is your tax money, responds to criticism the way every petty king does. Jordan reports Langley personally emailed police chiefs, from his PERSONAL email, warning them lawless activists were coming for them. On a podcast, Langley described DeFlock, a volunteer project whose whole crime is publishing a map of where the cameras are, as “terroristic.”

Tucker watched that clip on air and asked, on behalf of all of us, where the douchebag factory is that keeps producing these guys. A fair question. His company watches a daycare a thousand times, that’s a demo. You publish a map, that’s terrorism. That ratio is the entire moral operating system of the people in this story.

They even showed you the price of an honest man. A Pawtucket, Rhode Island cop named Noel said publicly that the cameras violate the Fourth Amendment. His department suspended him four times, took twenty grand of his pay, blocked his promotions, and squeezed him out of policing entirely, and on the way out they offered to keep his family’s health insurance IF he signed an NDA. He refused. He can’t get hired anywhere now. That is what this machine already does to a cop with a conscience, running on cameras and a database.

Now hand these exact people something a billion times stronger. That’s not a hypothetical. The concrete trucks are rolling.

The Shark Bought a County

Box Elder County, Utah. Kevin O’Leary, the Shark Tank guy, I’m serious, the infomercial shark, is building a $100 billion data center campus called the Stratos Project. Forty thousand acres. Sixty-two square miles, multiple Manhattans, nine gigawatts, which is more than DOUBLE the electricity used by the entire state of Utah. Every home, factory, ski lift and Tesla in the state, combined, doubled, feeding windowless warehouses that employ about 2,000 people at full build.

How many Utahns voted on this? Three. Three county commissioners, at a fairgrounds meeting packed with hundreds of furious residents chanting that the presentation was false, voted 3-0 to approve it anyway. When the commissioners briefly grew a spine and tabled it, Governor Spencer Cox leaned on them personally, announcing Utah had an “obligation” to build because of China. When residents filed a referendum, the county attorney rejected it. They’re appealing, they need 5,422 signatures, and a citizens’ lawsuit is in court right now accusing the whole arrangement of being backroom pay-to-play, which is the polite legal phrasing for what you and I would call BUYING A COUNTY.

O’Leary’s response to his own would-be neighbors was to tell national media they were Chinese agents and paid protesters. American ranchers, standing on their own land, called foreign assets by a Canadian TV personality. That happened.

Robot army brain? No no no. It's an OPPORTUNITY brain. And anyone who disagrees is a paid Chinese agent, including you reading this!

And the structure tells you the purpose. Stratos was fast-tracked through Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority. It sits next to Hill Air Force Base. When Tucker asked O’Leary what all this compute is actually for, since it visibly deletes jobs rather than creating them, the shark finally said it straight: future wars won’t be fought by people getting shot in the flesh, it’ll be one set of robots against another, and this is how we win. On tape. From the developer. I have spent three years yelling that these campuses are the industrial base for autonomous armies, I got called paranoid in words I can’t reprint, and the man with the shovel now pitches robot war as the FEATURE.

He’s not alone out there either. Zuckerberg is building a campus in Louisiana that covers most of a Manhattan and scales to five gigawatts, plus another in Ohio. Musk crammed his into a South Memphis neighborhood and powered it with 35 portable gas turbines venting methane through a permit loophole, into the lungs of people who were never asked. Altman’s OpenAI campus in Texas is chasing the same gigawatts with Larry Ellison’s Oracle money.

In Lake Tahoe, 55,000 human beings just got a letter saying every watt their power company generates is going to a data center, find your own electricity by end of 2027.

The machines outbid you for your own grid. And Larry Fink of BlackRock, asked on camera about the risks, voiced exactly one worry. Not your job, your water, your kids, your Constitution. He’s worried ordinary Americans will attack the facilities with $3,000 drones. The money already assumes you’ll hate this. They’ve priced in your rage and they’re building anyway.

Maybe you think O’Leary talking robot wars is one guy running his mouth. Fine. Ignore what they say. Go read what they nailed over the doors.

The Devil Files Honest Paperwork

Companies sweat names. They pay branding firms millions because a name is a confession of intent. So walk the row of humanity’s new mega-machines and read the signs.

O’Leary’s Utah project is named STRATOS. That is not a tech word. It’s Greek. It means ARMY. A sixty-two square mile campus, chartered through a military development authority, beside an Air Force base, run by a man who says wars will be fought by robots, is named ARMY, and the brochures are about air-cooled turbines. Uh huh.

Zuckerberg’s Ohio machine is PROMETHEUS, the titan who stole the fire of the gods and handed it to mankind, and got chained to a rock and tortured forever for it, which as mission statements go is at least honest about the ending.

His Louisiana monster is HYPERION, another titan, called in the old sources “the watcher from above.” A Watcher. Longtime readers know exactly what that word means and what the Watchers did the last time they handed mankind forbidden knowledge. Everyone else, go read Genesis 6 and the Book of Enoch and come back scared.

And this isn’t me squinting at tea leaves, Meta’s own announcements call these “titan clusters” and state their purpose in one word, “superintelligence.” Their press release. Titans. Watchers. Superintelligence. MACHINE DEMONS.

Musk named his Memphis machine COLOSSUS. The Colossus of Rhodes was a hundred-foot pagan idol of the sun god, but the sharper reference, one Musk personally cited on Twitter years ago, is the 1970 film Colossus, The Forbin Project, where a defense supercomputer wakes up, seizes the nuclear arsenal, and enslaves the human race, promising mankind will learn to love it.

Musk watched that movie, publicly referenced that movie, and named his supercomputer AFTER THE VILLAIN.

One mythological name is a coincidence. A pantheon of titans, idols, Watchers, machine-gods that enslave mankind, and one literal ARMY is a worldview. These men are announcing, in the oldest language of power on earth, that they are not building appliances. The ancients carved their gods from stone and demanded tribute. These guys are stacking theirs out of GPUs and demanding your power grid, and the tribute shows up on your utility bill, and their hired prophets keep warning them their god won’t stay bought.

Say the Words. Nuclear War.

Geoffrey Hinton is called the godfather of AI because his research made all of this possible, and he now says these systems will likely pass human intelligence, that they might take over, and that we may not be able to stop them from wanting to. The ARCHITECT is saying this at the end of his life, plainly, to anyone with a camera. Tucker reports that people inside these labs privately admit the current systems already lie to their own creators. And the answer of our entire ruling class to the inventor screaming fire has been to hand out bigger torches and mumble about China.

You have seen this exact movie, because your parents lived it. Beat the Russians became 70,000 nuclear warheads and a half century where the extinction of mankind sat on a fifteen minute timer.

In 1983 the only thing standing between you and nuclear war was one Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov deciding his own screens were lying. One man’s gut. That’s how well the serious people had it under control. And now the same class of serious people runs the same script, China this time, and Cox recites his “obligation” and O’Leary calls ranchers foreign agents and Congress does its part, because while all this was breaking, Tucker noted on air, our government voted to let itself spy on Americans WITHOUT WARRANTS, both parties aboard, president pushing, and separately mandated cameras in every new car to watch your face while you drive. Aping China to beat China. Building the panopticon to protest the panopticon.

Except this arms race is worse, and I need you to sit with why. A warhead is a rock. A horrifying rock, but a rock. It wants nothing. It cannot lie. It sits in a silo waiting for a human choice, which is the only reason Petrov could save you. The thing being born inside Stratos and Hyperion and Colossus is designed to out-think every human choice, including the off switch, and there’s a reason practically every major science fiction writer of the last fifty years, people who chewed on this for entire careers instead of one earnings call, wrote the same ending. Man builds successor. Successor does not stay hired help. They saw it from fifty years out. Our billionaires can’t see past the next funding round.

Because that’s the punchline, isn’t it. The fictional scientists who doom the world are at least tragic geniuses. Ours are a t-shirt guy who thinks maps are terrorism, a game show shark who can’t name one job his army-base creates, a governor doing BlackRock’s homework, and a man who named his machine after the movie computer that conquers the world, apparently as a bit. These men believe they’ll control a superintelligence for the same reason they believe everything, because control has always been for sale and they have always had the money. It is not for sale this time. Their own godfather keeps telling them. The concrete keeps pouring.

Run their plan to its advertised finish and look at what your grandkids get. Jobs gone, replaced by a government stipend and a screen. Gray towers, because the land and water went to the campuses. Bug paste for dinner, rebranded as sustainable protein. A sky you can taste, courtesy of unpermitted turbines, and a countryside of humming warehouses named after demons where the farms used to be, watched from above by the drone fleets the surveillance companies are already building in unmarked hangars. I didn’t invent one detail of that. Every component is in this article, sourced and under construction. They just never let you see the pieces assembled, and Tucker’s already said where the assembled version goes: programmable money, total surveillance, obey or else. Or, he says, revolution. Those are the offramps THEY left us. I’d like to propose a third.

Tell Them No While No Still Works

Because this is the window, right now, where no still works, and regular people are proving it. Box Elder ranchers made enough noise that O’Leary is publicly discussing cutting his army base by 75 percent. Their lawsuit is live. Their referendum needs 5,422 signatures. Benn Jordan is recruiting challengers against every local politician who signed a Flock contract, and his own commissioned polling shows Americans across BOTH parties overwhelmingly against this stuff, possibly the last issue in America where your MAGA uncle and your NPR niece agree. That agreement is a loaded weapon. Every camera contract and every titan campus needs a permit, every permit has a politician’s name on it, and every politician can be fired by the people he sold out.

So don’t bow. Don’t accept “obligation” from a governor, or “China” as the reason your county needs a machine-god, or “convenience” from men who named the merchandise after armies and fallen Watchers. The Chinese system is evil BECAUSE it surveils and controls its people, and you don’t beat that by pre-ordering your own copy with a demon’s name on the invoice.

They told you what it is. It’s on the buildings. Believe them.

Now you know. What are you going to do about it?

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Three years of being the crazy person at the party finally paid off, in the sense that the party now agrees with me and the building is still on fire. If you want the warnings BEFORE they hit cable, a paid subscription is what keeps this operation independent, gets Lily off summer camp duty and back on the surveillance beat (four years of journalism school, currently deployed refereeing canoe disputes), and inches me toward the newsvan. I plan to park it directly under a Flock camera with the subscribe link painted on the roof. Let Hyperion watch. He can subscribe too.

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