China haunts Bilderberg talks as usual suspects plot world domination – "maybe AI drones will fix things?!"

Charlie Skelton for The Guardian Sun 15 Jun 2025 […]

Wallenberg family hosting

A heady throng of tech billionaires, ministers, corporate titans and the king of the Netherlands have convened in Sweden for the 71st Bilderberg meeting – the publicity-shy annual policy conference that has long sustained conspiracy theorists – hosted this year by the fabulously wealthy Wallenberg family. The four days of transatlantic talks are taking place at the swanky Grand hotel, which is owned, like so much else in Sweden, by the Wallenbergs. [On the Wallenberg family from Wiki: The Wallenberg family is a prominent Swedish family of bankers, industrialists, politicians, bureaucrats and diplomats, present in most large Swedish industrial groups, including EQT AB, Ericsson, Electrolux, ABB, SAS Group, SKF, Atlas Copco, Saab AB, and more. In the 1970s, the Wallenberg family businesses employed 40% of Sweden's industrial workforce and represented 40% of the total worth of the Stockholm stock market. Their flagship company, Investor AB, has a market capitalization of around $60 billion.]

Defense companies

[…] What better time for the prospects of WWIII to go up a gear than in the middle of a Bilderberg conflab, with nuclear proliferation slated for discussion, and the heads of Nato and MI6, and two of America’s most senior military officers in the room. They’re joined in Stockholm by the CEOs of several major defence suppliers such as Palantir, Thales and Anduril. Even the quietly spoken host of the conference, Marcus Wallenberg, happens to run an arms company. He’s chair of Sweden’s largest defence contractor, Saab.

Authoritarian axis – aided and abetted by Trump

The Tehran attacks slot happily into the conference agenda, which includes the topics “Middle East” and the rise of an “authoritarian axis” – what Bilderberg insider Nadia Schadlow, a former deputy US national security adviser, describes as “the growing collusion among revisionist powers”. According to Schadlow: “An authoritarian axis is rapidly coalescing around China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea, disrupting the belief that an international community has taken shape in the aftermath of the cold war.” […] But The Economist handed Donald Trump a fair chunk of the blame for “junking the transatlantic alliance”. What this means for Bilderberg is that seven decades of hard work nurturing the postwar international order are in danger of going up in – literal – smoke. […]

China and we'd need more energy than all our current consumption for AI

Though the name “China” doesn’t actually appear on this year’s agenda, the heightening struggle between America and China is a spectre which haunts at least half of the topics being discussed – from the “geopolitics of energy and critical minerals” to “defence innovation and resilience”. Just a couple of months ago, Eric Schmidt, the former Google boss and longtime Bilderberg board member, warned that “China is at parity or pulling ahead of the United States in a variety of technologies, notably at the AI frontier”. Schmidt suspects that it will be only a matter of “three to five years” before some form of super-intelligent AI is achieved. “The geopolitical stakes, especially in the race with China, are enormous,” he says, because attaining super-intelligent AI would mean total and unassailable military domination. In short, it would give the winner “the keys to control the entire world”.

But here’s the problem – “due to the immense power requirements of large-scale AI”, beating China to the super-intelligent punch would require “potentially 100 times more energy” than is currently available. The head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, who is conferencing this year at Bilderberg, recently posted on X that “global electricity demand from data centres powering AI is set to soar in the next decade”. In this desperate winner-takes-all race for the keys to the world, in which the “geopolitics of energy” becomes ever more important, power stations – along with the data centers they feed – are going to become the No 1 military targets.

AI drones

Cue the AI drones.

For the time being, before AI invents completely new and unimagined ways for us all to kill each other, drones are perhaps the biggest practical application of AI in warfare. There’s a healthy swarm of drone manufacturers at this year’s Stockholm summit, sharing their hopes and fears about “defence innovation”. Hovering alongside Eric Schmidt there’s the chairman of Thales – “a leader in the fast growing market of unmanned aircraft systems”. Buzzing nearby is Gundbert Scherf, co-founder of German drone and AI company Helsing. One of the early investors in Helsing is also present: the CEO of Spotify, Daniel Ek, which presumably means that the Helsing drones will have the best playlists, booming out suggested songs as they swoop down to attack.

The investment interlinking of Bilderberg participants is particularly intense around autonomous drone tech. Saab is an investor in Helsing. Helsing is collaborating with leading AI company Mistral, whose CEO is attending the conference. Mistral was funded by Schmidt, who’s a huge fan of military UAVs.

Schmidt’s recent AI/drone expo, which took place last month in Washington, was co-sponsored by Palantir, which was set up by Bilderberg insider Peter Thiel, who is a major funder of Anduril, whose CEO, Brian Schimpf, is also in Stockholm. Schimpf is a former employee of Palantir, whose CEO, Alex Karp, is also on board of Bilderberg, having been ushered on to it by Thiel. And so it goes.

Thiel’s fingers can be found wriggling around in an awful lot of pies, not least the juiciest pie of all: the White House. The two senior White House officials at the Stockholm conference, Kevin Harrington and Michael Kratsios, both used to work for Thiel Capital. And Thiel’s famously long list of influential acolytes includes none other than Vance.

Narcissism and spying on every American

Only a few days ago, Vance was on a podcast defending Trump’s proposed Palantir-powered database on every citizen, which was described by MSNBC as “an unprecedented spy machine that could track Americans”. […] Thank heavens for everyone’s freedoms, Palantir is run by self-confessed “classic liberal” Alex Karp. In a recent earnings call, the idiosyncratic CEO said his company was busy “building really great things”, in order “to power the west to its obvious innate superiority”. Karp throbs with what he calls “productive narcissism” – at Palantir, he insists: “We’re proud of our moral stance”. His philosophy, as he sums it up, is this: “If you’ve done something big and important, you’re probably a good person.” Palantir is successful, ipso facto, it’s doing good. As The Economist put it: “Fast approaching is a might-is-right world.” […]

"We will be saved by AI, which will create the Land of Milk & Honey" – the "AI games"

Demis Hassabis, the co-founder of DeepMind, turned up in Stockholm with the 2024 Nobel prize for Chemistry in his back pocket and some rather more optimistic rhetoric about AI, which he thinks will usher in an era of “radical abundance”. He thinks of AI as “the cavalry” arriving to save us from ourselves. He says: “I’d be very worried about society today if I didn’t know that something as transformative as AI was coming down the line.”

And Jack Clark, the co-founder of Anthropic, likes to think AI replacing us in every last occupation will help us find new ways of living fulfilling lives. His vision is of a world in which, freed up from our jobs, we’ll engage in “creative, fun exercises in getting AIs to build things, or make things, or carry out competitions and games where people can play them with one another”. […]