War, AI and more war: the 2024 Bilderberg agenda is sure to set off alarm bells
The secretive annual summit has tried to counter its arcane reputation,
but its guest list still reads like a conspiracist’s who’s who of who
rules the world
This year the Bilderberg
summit, now under way in Madrid, turned 70 years old. But the
controversial and secretive gathering of the world’s elites shows no
signs of slowing down.
For decades the Bilderberg
meeting, where the rich and the powerful gather behind closed doors to
talk about what ails the world, has been the subject – understandably –
of conspiracy theories. In recent years, Bilderberg has sought to remake
itself and open up a little: more Davos than Illuminati.
But
it still raises hackles from many observers. Its beady eyes, twinkling
with billionaires, are this year fixed firmly on the future.
Specifically, the “future of warfare”. And with conflicts raging from
Sudan to Ukraine to Gaza, it feels like it is the spirit of the age.
This
grim subject is being thrashed out under the hum of police drones
hovering over the hotel, making sure such luminaries as the king of the
Netherlands and the head of Nato are safe inside. Even by Bilderberg
standards, the security at this year’s conference is intense, but it
managed to gear up even more when the Spanish king’s entourage swept
into the venue past a traffic jam of police vans.
The
heightened security is perhaps a reflection of the threats and
“challenges” packed into the conference agenda: Russia, China, the
Middle East, the climate – while the session on Ukraine, titled Ukraine
and the World, has a worrying hint of a wider world war. And when the
topic of the Changing Faces of Biology is being discussed by the CEO of
Pfizer, the head of the EU Centre for Disease Prevention and Control,
and the man who led the Human Genome Project, you can almost hear the
alarm bells over the police sirens.
The world of Bilderberg in 2024 throbs with
threats; it’s what conference participant Alexander Stubb, the president
of Finland, recently described as “the weaponisation of everything”.
It’s a world of “hybrid attacks” driven by disruptive technologies such
as artificial intelligence. There’s even a session on AI safety at this
year’s gathering, one of two sessions devoted to AI, securing its place
at the head of Bilderberg’s agenda.
The
conference hall is heaving with tech luminaries, including the heads of
Google DeepMind, Microsoft AI, Mistral AI and Anthropic, making the
event a high-level AI summit in its own right.
Many
of these AI chiefs are tech optimists; Demis Hassabis, the CEO of
Google DeepMind, recently raved about AI “spreading consciousness to the
stars”. But the contingent of US national security officials, who have
flowed in from Washington for these talks, tend to take a more worldly
and weaponised view of the subject. They’re led by the deputy national
security adviser, Jonathan Finer, and Jen Easterly, the director of the
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. They are joined by one
of the US’s most senior soldiers, the supreme allied commander Europe,
Christopher Cavoli, who warned recently that the conflict with Russia
was shaping up to be a “long fight”. So the immediate future of war
sounds like it’ll be more war.
It’s just sad that Henry Kissinger isn’t here to enjoy it. The elder statesman of Bilderberg died in November at the age of 100.
Certainly the world’s military – and the
industries that surround it – take Bilderberg seriously. Gen Cavoli is
taking time out from leading a “wholesale modernization” of Nato’s
defense capabilities to attend the Madrid conference. His boss at Nato,
Jens Stoltenberg, is attending his last Bilderberg as secretary general.
His successor is hotly tipped to be Mark Rutte, the outgoing Dutch
prime minister. Rutte is a Bilderberg regular, and doubtless the group
will be delighted, though perhaps not surprised, if yet another of their
charmed circle lands a top job.
The other
prime minister here in Madrid is Estonia’s Kaja Kallas, who said
recently that “openness is our greatest weapon” in free societies. “At
its core,” she said, “openness represents getting rid of barriers that
hinder the flow of information.”
Sadly, we
won’t know if she talks at Bilderberg about openness, because of all the
barriers hindering the flow of information. We do know that Kallas
believes that on the battlefield, “Ukraine has out-innovated Russia,
fielding entirely new weapons systems” – some of which will have been
developed by the tech companies at this year’s conference.
Time
magazine has dubbed Ukraine “an AI war lab”, and the Economist agrees,
describing it as “a testing ground for companies like Anduril and
Palantir” – the heads of both of these defense tech companies are here
in Madrid.
The founder of Anduril Industries is Palmer
Luckey, the designer of Oculus VR, who got bored of making headsets and
wanted to build autonomous combat vehicles instead – so in 2017 he set
up the defense contractor Anduril Industries, with investment from
Founders Fund, which is run by the venture capitalist and Bilderberg
insider Peter Thiel. Another of Thiel’s happy investments was in
Palantir – the AI surveillance giant run by Alex Karp, who sits
alongside his mentor, Thiel, on Bilderberg’s steering committee.
War
is a fantastic opportunity for R&D; as Karp says: “There are things
that we can do on the battlefield that we could not do in a domestic
context.” Meanwhile in Palestine, Palantir technology is being used by
the IDF “in support of war-related missions”. The onslaught has been
excellent for the company’s bottom line. “Our products have been in
great demand,” enthuses Karp.
Karp’s fellow Bilderberg insider and Pentagon
favourite Eric Schmidt, who used to run Google, is said by Forbes
magazine to have been so “inspired by Ukraine’s use of drones on the
battlefield” that he has spent the past year “working on a secret
military drone project”.
But for now, if
Ukraine is to win the drone war, Schmidt says that it needs “sustained
financial and technical support from Kyiv’s allies”. This sentiment will
surely be echoed by Ukraine’s representative at the Madrid conference,
the foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, who will no doubt be doing his best
to coax some extra billions out of the crowd.
This
year’s Bilderberg is thick with senior ministers and EU commissioners,
not to mention the heads of the European Investment Bank and the Bank of
Spain.
The event itself is being hosted by Ana Botín, the executive chair of
Banco Santander, and the heads of numerous other finance giants are
attending, including Citigroup, Deutsche Bank and Societé Générale.
Big
business tends to pick up the tab for Bilderberg, because it’s such a
high-end investment opportunity. Bilderberg is the boardroom of the
western alliance, so they get to participate in the shaping of the grand
strategy and hopefully get a jump on the market.
It’s
looking like next year’s host will be the Swedish billionaire investor
Marcus Wallenberg, the chairman of defense company Saab. His senior
adviser, Oscar Stenström, has been hovering round the venue as a member
of the conference “pre-team”. Stenström was the chief negotiator for
Sweden’s successful accession to Nato in March, and what better way to
toast the ongoing expansion of the Alliance than with a Scandinavian
Bilderberg. Skål!
