This year’s globalist confab: it’s all about technocracy, AI, drones, and the next generation of warfare.
The Bilderberg conference, an elite three-day get-together of business, political and academic elites — largely ignored by the mainstream media — is over for another year. At the 2025 conference, held at a five star hotel in Stockholm, around 120 politicians, military leaders, academics and corporate CEOs discussed the pressing issues of the day such as the US economy, depopulation, the Middle East, Ukraine and AI.
Gathered at the Grand Hotel alongside the Finnish president and the King of the Netherlands were the heads of huge multinational companies such as BP, Santander, Saab, Citigroup, Microsoft and a healthy smattering of tech billionaires such as PayPal founder Peter Thiel and former Google boss Eric Schmidt. The amount of private wealth at Bilderberg is giddying, many of the biggest conglomerate bosses are representatives of vast family holdings, such as Robert Maersk Uggla, chair of Møller-Maersk, the fifth generation of the Maersk family to lead the company.
American delegates at this year’s conference included Admiral Samuel Paparo, head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, Republican congressman Jason Smith, and one of Trump’s closest economic advisors, Robert Lighthizer, who has been a vocal advocate of US trade tariffs against China. They were joined by two senior members of the Trump administration: Kevin Harrington, a senior director at the National Security Council and Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Kratsios and Harrington are both, predictably, former employees of Peter Thiel. Looking somewhat exhausted, Thiel was in and out of the Bilderberg venue all weekend, never resting, perhaps never even sleeping. Too much to do. Too many side meetings to attend.
The list of power players at the meeting would be less concerning were it not for the plethora of public officials also attending the conference, including the Greek PM, the vice president of the EU parliament, the Polish foreign minister, the UK minister for Health and Social Care, and a handful of EU commissioners. The summit was also thick with finance ministers, including those from Canada, Germany, Sweden and Turkey. The Norwegian finance minister was also present – Jens Stoltenberg, former co-chair of the group, is a conference veteran attending as the head of NATO, until he was replaced in the role by another Bilderberg regular, former prime minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte.
The Stockholm conference appears to have been conceived as a welcome to Sweden and Finland upon first entering NATO. In fact, the negotiator for the Scandinavian NATO deal, Oscar Stenstrom, was also the Bilderberg 2025 conference organiser. He now works for the Bilderberg steering committee member, Marcus Wallenberg, who hosted the meeting — funding it largely through donations from the Wallenberg family’s Investor AB group. The Wallenberg family was also represented at the conference by Marcus’s cousin Jacob, also a former Bilderberg steering committee member; it’s clear that the Swedish seat on the Bilderberg steering committee is a family one .
Although the celebratory NATO party, attended by the Swedish prime minister Ulf Kristofferson, lasted for Thursday night, it wasn’t long before the hangover set in when Sweden and Finland woke up to being part of NATO with World War 3 very much on the horizon. Several delegates such as the Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis quickly and discreetly left the conference on the Friday morning — an interesting development given that the Israeli government’s official plane, The Wing of Zion, landed in Athens, Greece at 1.06pm on Friday 13th June.
IMAGE: Greek prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis with iconic blue Bilderberg folder, leaving the conference abruptly on Friday morning, possibly to meet the Israeli gov plane Wing of Zion which arrived in Athens at 1.06pm later that day (Credit: Hannah Borno @goldenfiligree)
IMAGE: Bilderberg steering committee member and former head of MI6 Sir John Sawers who has just recently urged the use of American “bunker buster” bombs in Iran, and Dimitri Papalexopoulos, Bilderberg treasurer and chair of TITAN cement taking the air together in Stockholm at the Bilderberg conference last weekend (Credit: Hannah Borno @goldenfiligree)
IMAGE: Daniel Ek, CEO of Spotify and Demis Hassabis Co-Founder and CEO, Google DeepMind enjoy a confidential chat on Saturday afternoon between conference sessions in the fresh Stockholm air (Credit: Hannah Borno @goldenfiligree)
IMAGE: Kevin Harrington, Senior Director for Strategic Planning, National Security Council, and former managing director of Thiel Macro LLC, the hedge fund which manages Peter Thiel’s capital (Credit: Hannah Borno @goldenfiligree)
IMAGE: Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI which creates products such Azure AI, for the Israeli and other militaries, leaving the conference looking thoughtful (Credit: Hannah Borno @goldenfiligree)
IMAGE: Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, arrives at the conference on Thursday before leaving hastily the next day after the commencement of Israeli airstrikes on Iran (Credit: Tristen Lundberg)
Alex Karp, the wild-eyed CEO of Palantir, a company responsible for much of the drone targeting software employed by the Israelis, also left on Friday morning, as did his mentor Peter Thiel (only to reappear later in the weekend).
Bilderberg’s Full Spectrum Dominance: Defense, Drones and AI
Given that global conflicts are exploding so rapidly, it seems Bilderberg has been betting on the right horseman of the apocalypse: war. Conference host, the billionaire Marcus Wallenberg, is also the chair of the largest arms manufacturer in Sweden, Saab — “a leading defence and security company”. On the conference agenda this year was Defence Innovation, along with AI — and the line between defence and artificial intelligence is getting ever more blurred.
The timing of last Friday’s attack by Israel against Iran couldn’t have been more apt, with topics including the Middle East and the rise of an “authoritarian axis”, comprised of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.
Bilderberg steering committee member Satya Nadella of Microsoft Corporation now provides software, Azure cloud services, and Azure AI services to the Israeli and other militaries. And the Wallenberg group, owners of the Grand Hotel, along with huge swathes of Swedish industry and finance, announced recently the building of a major Swedish AI factory in partnership with AstraZeneca, Ericsson and SEB: “Investing in cutting-edge AI infrastructure is a crucial step toward accelerating the development and adoption of AI across Swedish industry,” said Wallenberg. Saab has recently partnered with the German drone and AI developer Helsing, whose co-CEO was also at the Stockholm talks.
Bilderberg has long been invested in arms, weapons and the dirty money associated with them. In the early 1960s Bilderberg founder Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands took $1.1 million as a bribe from Lockheed Martin to guarantee military aircraft contracts. The scandal broke in the mid 1970s, leading to the conference being cancelled in 1976. He denied the charges but later admitted them saying: “I have accepted that the word Lockheed will be carved on my tombstone.”
In the present day as war fast becomes the only game in town, with corporations and governments all skewing towards AI and defence, Bilderberg steering committee members are increasingly involved in military-oriented start-ups. Typical of this is ex-Google Eric Schmidt — no stranger to the highest levels of Pentagon planning. Schmidt was the inaugural chair of the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Board from 2016 until 2020 and was appointed chairman of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) in 2018 whose mandate was to guide the DoD on the use of AI in a military context. But it wasn’t until 2023 that Schmidt created his drone startup, White Stork, whose AI-powered attack drones have been used in the war in Ukraine. Schmidt declared last year that “The future of war is AI, networked drones of many different kinds.”
In the Bilderberg conference room, which is arranged alphabetically, Schmidt would have been next to two other drone makers: Gundbert Scherf, the co-founder of Helsing and Brian Schimpf the co-founder of Anduril Industries. If drones comprise the future of warfare then Bilderberg is right there at the cutting edge.
Paypal founder Peter Thiel’s involvement with the Pentagon dates much earlier than Schmidt: he received funding for Palantir from the CIA’s tech funding arm In-Q-Tel back in 2005. And in 2008 Palantir began working with the US Army. But it was almost a decade later, in 2017, when Palantir gained access to Secretary Mattis’s inner circle and several ex-Palantir staff joined the Pentagon. By now, the dividing line between Thiel’s acolytes and the Pentagon is completely blurred.
Alongside Thiel’s AI acolytes Brian Schimpf and Alex Karp, the conference also welcomed Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, Demis Hassabius of Google DeepMind, Jack Clark Co-Founder of Anthropic, and Arthur Mensch, Co-Founder and CEO, Mistral AI. Bilderberg has clearly remodelled itself as the golden ticket on the elite AI conference circuit offering something that no other tech conference can give – three whole days of unparalleled access to heads of state, decision makers, big finance and of course the Secretary General of NATO.
IMAGE: Former Google CEO and arch globalist Eric Schmidt out for a light walk (Credit: Tristen Lundberg)
Apart from his interest in military tech, Eric Schmidt also expounds on how AI will have a beneficial, transforming effect on our lives, “potentially reshaping society on the scale of the Enlightenment.” In his testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Energy & Commerce in April, Schmidt argued that the future of energy and power production was bound up with the future of artificial intelligence: “AI development is inherently power-hungry,” he said, and “its computational demands will only escalate.” He says that “the future of computation” requires “potentially 100x more energy”, but he urges the US government to make “strategic bets on game-changing technologies”. His hope is that, with enough energy inputted, AI will come along with solutions to environmental collapse: I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it and having the problem, if you see my plan.” This is an optimistic vision shared by the CEO of Google DeepMind and regular Bilderberg participant, Nobel peace prize winner Demis Hassabis, who likes to think of AI as “the cavalry”, turning up to sort out our troubled world.
Albert Bourla, the chair and CEO of Pfizer and a keen advocate of fast tracking AI in big pharma is rapidly becoming a conference regular. In 2021 the New York based CEO accepted on behalf of Pfizer, the David Rockefeller Award, given by the Museum of Modern Art, whose president, cosily enough, is co-chair of Bilderberg’s steering committee: the elegant LMVH board member, Marie-Josée Kravis – also based in New York. Another director of LVMH is her co-chair: Henri de Castries. You can’t help feeling there’s a tension within Bilderberg between the stylish, LVMH-types, with their Louis Vuitton luggage and old-world manners, and their ideological investment in the transatlantic alliance, and the even more influential Silicon Valley contingent who dress and comport themselves rather differently. Eric Schmidt, is something of a blend of the two: while he runs a rocket company and his billions came from Google, he’s the longtime co-author and chosen heir of the late lamented Henry Kissinger, who was the leading light of Bilderberg for decades. He’s a tech billionaire who is nethertheless fully embedded in the ongoing history of the Anglo-American empire, and is the obvious choice to replace Marie-Josée Kravis as US co-chair of Bilderberg when she eventually steps down from the role. Henri de Castries had recently stepped down as co-chair, giving way to ex-NATO boss Jens Stoltenberg. When Stoltenberg had to bow out temporarily to become Norway’s finance minister Castries found himself back in the role.
The Bilderberg steering committee is a breeding ground for technocrat leaders. Mario Monti led the way, the first banker to lead a democratic nation when he became premier of Italy — he was attending this year’s conference in his role as ‘Senator for Life’. Monti started a trend which led to Mary Carney becoming premier of Canada, after which he of course, resigned his Bilderberg steering committee seat. Jens Stoltenberg, recent head of NATO, and Bilderberg co-chair for just a few months resigned earlier this year to become Norway’s finance minister. Just like Radoslaw Sikorski who resigned to become Polish foreign minister, and Bill Burns resigned to become Biden’s head of the CIA.
IMAGE: Former Swedish prime minister and co European chair of the Trilateral Commission, Carl Bildt sees off Borge Brende, president and CEO of the World Economic Forum from the Grand Hotel, Stockholm at Bilderberg 2025 (Credit: Hannah Borno @goldenfiligree)
The Bilderberg steering committee is a small and cosy club similar to the Trilateral Commission, which was founded by one of the earliest attendees at Bilderberg, David Rockefeller. In fact, Belgian billionaire and Bilderberg steering committee member Thomas Leysen is also a member of the European Executive Committee of the Trilateral Commission. The European co-chairman of the Trilateral Commission and former Swedish prime minister, Carl Bildt, spent a lot of time at this year’s Bilderberg conference venue in Stockholm without actually appearing on the official list of participants. He was there hanging out with Børge Brende of the WEF and was spotted waving off Mark Rutte, head of NATO. Bildt and his wife were also spotted taking a leisurely coffee on Sunday morning at an adjacent hotel with Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski and his wife, anti Russian hawk and conference regular Anne Applebaum (whilst Polish nationals suffered chaos in Israel that weekend during evacuations – a situation their super relaxed foreign minister would have done well to keep abreast of).
IMAGE: Husband and wife power team Polish foreign minister Radoslaw Sikorski and anti Russian agitator Anne Applebaum go on one of their customary walks between sessions at Bilderberg (Credit: Hannah Borno @goldenfiligree)
For your workaday politicians who are used to being big fishes in small ponds, the meeting places them firmly, if temporarily, in a supra-national league as they step into an intense world populated by billionaires, weapons manufacturers, royals and corporate behemoths. Many are never invited back, but some like Mark Rutte, become conference darlings, attending multiple times before landing one of the big jobs like head of NATO. It’s hard to convey just how much of a hothouse atmosphere is created within the heavily guarded hotel walls, as delegates cut off from outside ties or commitments for three days, with high pressure discussion panels starting early and ending late at night where everyone is expected to speak out and shine, followed by champagne drinks parties spent rubbing shoulders with royals and the wealthiest people in the world. This social and intellectual hothousing is the perfect method to seed a cult-like way of thinking, an unquestioning consensus that the Transatlantic alliance is a great and wonderful thing, NATO a truly noble endeavour and untrammelled, unregulated AI, powering drone networks and hoovering up the data of entire populations, is right, inevitable and will be happening tomorrow – if it hasn’t already happened today.
Author Hannah Borno is a former glossy magazine journalist who has been following the Bilderberg group on location since the 2010 meeting in Stiges, Spain. When not attempting to take pictures of billionaires, spy chiefs and high ranking politicians, she lives quietly in central Portugal with a load of animals, her husband and two boys. Follow here on X.com @goldenfiligree
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