Longtime Zuckerberg deputy Andrew Bosworth calls donning fatigues with Palantir and OpenAI brass ‘great honor’
Meta’s chief technology officer has called it “the great honor of my life” to be enlisted in a new US army corps that defence chiefs set up to better integrate military and tech industry expertise, including senior figures from top tech firms that also include Palantir and OpenAI.
Andrew Bosworth, a long-term lieutenant to Mark Zuckerberg known widely as “Boz”, is one of several senior Silicon Valley executives commissioned to the rank of lieutenant colonel in the corps, called Detachment 201, which the US army says will “fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation”.
Bosworth, who joined Facebook in 2006, was sworn into the army reserves earlier this month alongside Shyam Sankar, the chief technology officer of Palantir, a technology firm with extensive defence contracts, Kevin Weil, chief product officer of OpenAI, and Bob McGrew, an adviser at Thinking Machines Lab, a $10bn AI company. They wore military fatigues at the swearing-in ceremony but will not be full-time soldiers.
The recruitment is a sign of the increasing importance of technology in modern warfare and growing commercial and research links between some of the largest tech firms and the military. The US army said it was “just the start of a bigger mission to inspire more tech pros to serve without leaving their careers”.
