One of the few things that the Trump 2.0 administration and Keir Starmer government have in common is the amount of influence Ellison has over both of them.
The world’s fourth richest man, Larry Ellison, has a vision for the future, and it is one that most of us would never vote for if given the chance (which, of course, we won’t be). It essentially involves harvesting and storing all of a nation’s data, including all of its citizens’ most personal data, in one place, and then letting AI programs scour all over it. That data, he says, should include economic data, electronic healthcare records, including our genomic data, spatial information, agricultural data and info about infrastructure.
“I have to tell [the] AI model as much about my country as I can,” Ellison said in a recent onstage discussion with his old friend Tony Blair at the World Governments Summit. “We need to unify all the national data, put it into a database where it’s easily consumable by the AI model, and then ask whatever question you like. That’s the missing link.”
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Ellison believes that the benefits of such a system will include improved healthcare, thanks to treatments tailored to individuals, as well as the ability for governments to increase food production by better predicting crop yields. And he was touting those benefits to senior representatives of many of the world’s governments, with Blair by his side helping to lubricate the sales pitch.
The octogenarian tech titan has an almost religious faith in AI, describing it as “maybe” the most important discovery in the entire history of humankind. He is also aggressively pushing for governments, particularly the US and the UK, to embrace AI-enabled control and surveillance technologies, with a significant onus on biometric identifiers — something that both countries have already been doing for some time, with a certain amount of help from Ellison.
In fact, Oracle, the company Ellison co-founded in 1977 and of which he is still CEO, has been so busy amassing the online data of the world’s citizens that in 2022 it faced a class action suit in California over its worldwide surveillance machine. According to the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), one of the three class representatives, Oracle has claimed to have amassed detailed dossiers on 5 billion people:
Oracle’s dossiers about people include names, home addresses, emails, purchases online and in the real world, physical movements in the real world, income, interests and political views, and a detailed account of online activity: [4] for example, one Oracle database included a record of a German man who used a prepaid debit card to place a €10 bet on an esports betting site.[5]
The class action suit was eventually settled in 2024 after Oracle agreed to pay $115 million to the more than 3.2 million people who had submitted claims. In the end, eligible class members received around $25 each, while lawyers for the plaintiffs walked away with $28 million in fees.
A World Without Passwords and PINs
Now, Ellison wants to take AI-enabled digital surveillance and control systems to a new level by totally centralising them, despite the obvious security implications. He also envisions a world without passwords and personal identification numbers (PINs) in which access to IT systems and tech platforms will be based purely on our biometric identifiers. As he says in the clip below of his recent chat with Blair, “this is the last year you will ever log onto an Oracle system with a password… biometric logins are the future.”
Tony Blair: How important is Digital Public Infrastructure [Digital ID, Fast Payments, Data Sharing]?
Larry Ellison: Biometric logins are the future. No more passwords. Keep the data in the country.
World Governments Summit, #WGS25 #WorldGovSummit https://t.co/OSWTWvEjM6 pic.twitter.com/eH0A4bXX06— Tim Hinchliffe (@TimHinchliffe) February 12, 2025
Ellison also talks about the need for national governments to have their own “sovereign” data centres to power their AI systems, which will provide Oracle lots of new business opportunities given it is the world’s largest database management company. In an Oracle financial analysts meeting in September, he told investors that AI will usher in a new era of surveillance that he gleefully said will ensure “citizens will be on their best behaviour.” From Business Insider:
Ellison said AI would be used in the future to constantly watch and analyze vast surveillance systems, like security cameras, police body cameras, doorbell cameras, and vehicle dashboard cameras.
“We’re going to have supervision,” Ellison said. “Every police officer is going to be supervised at all times, and if there’s a problem, AI will report that problem and report it to the appropriate person. Citizens will be on their best behavior because we are constantly recording and reporting everything that’s going on.”
Ellison also expects AI drones to replace police cars in high-speed chases. “You just have a drone follow the car,” Ellison said. “It’s very simple in the age of autonomous drones.” He did not say if those drones would broadcast the chases on network news.
Ellison’s company, Oracle, like almost every company these days, is aggressively pursuing opportunities in the AI industry. It already has several projects in the works, including one in partnership with Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Like his friend and business associate Elon Musk, Ellison has taken up a prominent place within the new Trump administration, with the two-term president describing him as a “sort of CEO of everything,… an amazing man.” Unlike most Silicon Valley CEOs including Musk, Ellison was on board with the MAGA project during Trump’s first term. He was even at the White House on Trump’s first full day back in office where he unveiled Trump’s $500 billion “Stargate” AI infrastructure project alongside OpenAI’s Sam Altman and SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son.
“AI holds incredible promise for all of us,” Ellison said. “We’ve been working with OpenAI for awhile. The data centers are actually under construction, the first of them are under construction in Texas… Each building is half a million square feet. There are 10 buildings currently being built, but that will expand to 20 and other locations.”
Like Peter Thiel, a fellow Trump supporter who helped enable JD Vance’s rapid rise to the vice presidency, Ellison owes a large part of his success to a simple business model: spinning off a sprawling CIA tech project into a giant private-sector business. This part of his success story is often ignored or played down by mainstream media and academia. In September last year Gizmodo pilloried Vox for publishing an entire in-depth article about Oracle and its founder without “even once” mentioning the CIA:
Which is pretty astounding, given the fact that Oracle takes its name from a 1977 CIA project codename. And that the CIA was Oracle’s first customer.
Vox simply says that Oracle was founded in “the late 1970s” and “sells a line of software products that help large and medium-sized companies manage their operations.” All of which is true! But as the article continues, it somehow ignores the fact that Oracle has always been a significant player in the national security industry. And that its founder would not have made his billions without helping to build the tools of our modern surveillance state.
“Recognizing the potential demand for a commercial database product, [Ellison] founded the company that became Oracle in 1977,” Vox writes, conspicuously omitting the whole “because CIA wanted a relational database” part of the history.
Which isn’t to say that Oracle’s work with the US government should necessarily be frowned upon. The CIA needs databases, just like any large organization. But not mentioning just how reliant Oracle has been on government contracts since its inception is downright strange and seems to feed this narrative that Ellison simply created a product that companies wanted and private enterprise did the rest.
Straddling Two Governments
Today, Ellison is determined to turn his dystopian vision of the future into reality through his deep connections with two markedly different governments: Donald Trump’s second administration in the US and Kier Starmer’s Labour government in the UK.
In the US, not only will Ellison be spearheading the Trump administration’s AI agenda; his company, Oracle, is among the potential buyers of the Chinese social media giant Tik Tok’s US operations. And Oracle has an important head-start over many of its rivals: during Trump’s first term, it played a pivotal role in negotiations over stripping TikTok from its Chinese ownership, in the process becoming a trusted provider of the company’s data storage in the United States, a role it continues to play to this day.
In the UK, Ellison wields arguably even more political influence than in the US. As we have reported before, and as the Daily Mail (of all places) confirmed this past weekend, that influence is largely thanks to Ellison’s close ties with former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, which date all the way back to Blair’s early years in Downing Street when, as The Register reports, Oracle become a significant supplier of technology to the government”:
In fact, Oracle still runs more than half of the UK central government’s financial and planning software, including the Department for Work & Pensions, Ministry of Justice, Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, Cabinet Office, Home Office, HM Treasury, and Ministry of Defence.
The Home Office migrated to Oracle during Blair’s tenure as prime minister. In 2006, a damning NAO said the department’s inability to deliver its accounts on time were down to a problem with the system. Once a fix was implemented, it led to an adjustment of the bank account and creditor balances by £67 million ($85 million), according to Parliamentary records.
Ellison is also far and away the largest backer of Blair’s modestly named foundation, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (often shortened to TBI). From the Daily Mail piece:
The Ellison foundation bankrolled Sir Tony’s not-for-profit institute, known as TBI, with £43million in 2023 and £36million in 2022. Newly-released figures show it has set aside £178million more for TBI ‘to support effective governance work in Africa’.
Such largesse has helped TBI balloon in size. Founded in 2017, it now employs more than 800 people across 40 countries, with some executives earning as much as £540,000 a year, although Sir Tony does not take a salary.
This month, six months after Sir Tony’s jaunt on Ellison’s yacht, the pair were reunited at the World Governments Summit in Dubai. Appearing via a video link, with the image of Ellison’s face dwarfing Sir Tony as he sat on stage, the pair discussed artificial intelligence, with Ellison declaring that AI is a ‘much bigger deal’ than the invention of electricity or the Industrial Revolution.
As the Daily Mail article notes, Blair’s bromance with Ellison has “sparked accusations of a ‘conflict of interest’ as Sir Tony urges the Government to embrace artificial intelligence (AI) and digital health records: two technological revolutions worth millions to Ellison’s empire.”
The money from Ellison to TBI appears to be flowing in ever larger volumes, as Aaron Bastani points out in the interview below:
Tony Blair wants the NHS to sell patient data.
Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle and world’s 5th wealthiest person, has given over $100 million to the Tony Blair Institute.
Oracle wants to be a world leader in digital health data.
Follow the money. pic.twitter.com/LmXnp8qkFE
— Aaron Bastani (@AaronBastani) January 26, 2024
Blair already appears to wield significant influence over the Starmer government’s operations, with many of the key positions already occupied by members of the Blairite wing of the Labour Party, which has spent the past four years purging the party of its genuine left-wing politicians and members, including former party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, and the veteran British filmmaker Ken Loach.
Starmer’s government includes former employees and board members of TBI. As the veteran US journalist Robert Kuttner wrote before last year’s election, Starmer “has virtually outsourced his entire program to Tony Blair” and TBI. That is particularly true of the government’s AI agenda, with TBI insiders such as Patrick Vallance, Jeegar Kakkad and Kirsty Innes serving as ministers, advisors and influencers helping to shape the government’s tech policy.
Just four days ago, the FT reported, with a hint of irony, that Starmer has been warning his cabinet about the dangers of Blairism while bringing in more and more New Labour era staff:
The prime minister wrote a memo to his cabinet saying that the public are “hungry for change and disruption”.
In the letter, seen by the Financial Times, he repudiates ideas associated with Blairism, including the concept that “globalisation held all the answers”, an alleged “complacency” about the role of the market, and the idea that immigration is “an untrammelled good”…
Yet… the scale of the Blair revival is striking. Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff, is now Starmer’s national security adviser, while Liz Lloyd, deputy chief of staff in Downing Street from 2005-07, oversees domestic policy in Number 10.
Meanwhile, Lord Peter Mandelson, architect of Blair’s election triumphs, has the top diplomatic role of UK ambassador to the US, while Claire Reynolds, Starmer’s political director, smoothed party relations for Blair.
Douglas Alexander, the trade minister who prepped Blair for prime minister’s questions, was this month given a new Cabinet Office role, where he joins the influential Pat McFadden, Blair’s former political secretary.
As his influence expands on both sides of the Atlantic, it seems likely that Larry Ellison will get much of what he wants. He already has a $500 billion commitment from Trump to build a vast network of data centres across the US, many of which will be provided by Oracle. Meanwhile, the Starmer government has pledged to “turbocharge” AI across the UK. The proposed Data Use and Access Bill, which is speeding through parliament, will be instrumental in making this happen, by, among other things, relaxing the use of automated decision making technologies.
Since coming to power just eight months ago, the Starmer government has also:
- Ordered Apple, citing the Investigatory Powers Act 2016, to provide “back door” access to its devices, which would allow UK intelligence agencies to spy on British users. In response, Apple has removed its Advanced Data Protection (ADP) system, which encrypts user files uploaded to the cloud, from its iPhone systems in the UK.
- Announced plans to launch a digital identity system later this year. Veteran cards for former military personnel will be the first documents supported, followed by a pilot for mobile driver’s licenses (just as in the US). The government is also considering introducing a digital Voter Authority Certificate (VAC) that will “allow” voters to use digital versions of identification documents stored in the Gov.uk wallet at the polling stations. But as we’ve been warning for the past three years, privacy groups in the UK are claiming that the Gov.uk app could lead to a mandatory digital ID scheme.
- Unveiled plans to further expand the use of live facial recognition technology, on the same day that an EU-wide law largely banning real-time surveillance technology came into force;
- Called for the creation of digital health passports for NHS patients, prompting a backlash over concerns about digital privacy and the possible sale of patient data to third-party companies — a policy that Tony Blair and former Conservative Party leader William Hague lobbied for just before the elections.
- Resurrected old Tory plans to grant inspectors at the Department of Work and Pensions increased powers to snoop on claimants’ bank accounts. Big Brother Watch warned that the increased powers could be used to spy on not only the accounts of pensioners and welfare claimants but ALL bank accounts. It was one of 18 NGOs and charities that signed a letter to the government warning that “imposing suspicionless algorithmic surveillance on the entire public has the makings of a Horizon-style scandal – with vulnerable people most likely to bear the brunt when these systems go wrong.”
- Announced plans to pilot a Central Bank Digital Currency by 2025, carrying on Rishi Sunak’s controversial Digital Pound plans, with a “blueprint” expected by Christmas. As we reported last week, the proposal is not just opposed by most members of the British public, according to one of the few public surveys conducted on the matter, but also prominent figures within the City of London.
- Launched a crackdown on lawful speech. After the riots in the summer, the Home Office is planning new non-crime “hate” measures. Again, this was a policy that was eventually dropped by the Tories, out of fears it would curtail free speech, but is now being resurrected by Starmer’s Labour Party.
The Starmer government’s latest crackpot idea is to relax UK property laws in order to erase all possible obstacles for “innovators”. Put simply, the government wants to give Silicon Valley tech companies, including presumably Oracle, free reign to feast on the intellectual property of writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers, journalists, publishers, poets, documentary makers, authors, scriptwriters and anyone else who produces original creative works, whether for pleasure or for profit, including the 2.4 million people who depend on it to make a living.
The one silver lining is that by doing so, the government has enraged some very powerful, vocal and influential people, including Sir Paul McCartney and Sir Elton John who pointed out that the move jeopardises the UK’s entire music industry, which is arguably one of the few industries left in the country still going reasonably strong. Perhaps, just perhaps, this backlash will bring much-needed public awareness and attention to the wider picture. This isn’t just about the future of the UK’s music industry; it’s about the future of basic freedoms and rights in one of the world’s oldest parliamentary democracies.