Compliance by Tenderization

Compliance by Tenderization, a term coined by Kevin O'Leary (he also brands it 'Gen Z Grounding'), outlines an AI-driven warfare strategy focused on high-precision drone attacks against civilian infrastructure like homes, power plants, and garages. It's the Silicon Valley approach to geopolitics, where the goal is to economically squeeze regimes into compliance without traditional ground invasions or direct military casualties. The mainstream reaction, predictably, frames this as a radical, unethical, and potentially criminal escalation of warfare, focusing on the moral outrage of intentionally targeting civilian life. And they're not wrong to highlight the war crime implications. But this moral outrage often misses the core Silicon Valley logic: that 'tenderization' is just a more 'optimized' form of pressure, an economic algorithm applied to nations, where the human cost is abstracted away as 'friction' or 'unintended side effects' in pursuit of a 'solution'. What to remember is that the fight isn't just about the ethics of war, but about whether tech titans like O'Leary can redefine international conflict as a 'problem' solvable by algorithms and drones. This shifts power from diplomats and soldiers to data centers and venture capitalists, as O'Leary himself notes his new data centers will allocate 20% capacity for this AI defense strategy. It's the 'move fast and break things' ethos, but with national power grids instead of buggy apps. As economist Steve Keen puts it when O'Leary pitches the tactic: those are war crimes, not negotiation.