government. The scale of this divide has become staggering. The top five artificial intelligence companies in the United States—Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple—spent a total of $70.5 billion on research and development in 2018. That is money they are investing in the future. In contrast, the top five defense companies—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—spent a total of $6.2 billion. Indeed, Apple regularly sits on around $245 billion of “cash on hand,” enough money to buy all five of those top US defense companies outright.
