To be sure, defense contracts are hardly new in Silicon Valley, and Google’s recent moves might be seen as heralding Silicon Valley’s return to its natural home in defense contracting. But that would be to misunderstand both Silicon Valley history and today’s technology.

The internet and much of digital computing did indeed emerge from decades of United States defense contracts, beginning as long ago as World War I. Yet the Pentagon itself sloughed off the internet — not knowing quite what to do with it, and rightly judging it to be insecure — to the National Science Foundation. When the internet became a commercial concern, the National Science Foundation off-loaded it to the Department of Commerce. Government might have given birth to the internet, but it sure didn’t raise it.

The emergence of a civilian, entrepreneurial tech culture in the 1970s owed as much intellectually, if not (at first) financially, to the antiwar movement and the 1960s counterculture — hardly friends of the military-industrial complex. Out of this the dominant, highly creative ethos of geek antiauthoritarianism grew. It is hard to believe that closer ties with the military would perpetuate this culture of innovation.

The technology involved in projects like Azure Government Secret and Project Maven is also very different from the data-sharing projects of the 1960s. Those older technologies would not have been created in the absence of government funding. Today’s projects, in contrast, are all basically A.I. plays. Very little of this is defense-specific, but all of it is useful for defense and espionage. Unlike, say, weapons development, A.I. research is inherently dual-use. United States tech giants would be pursuing it with or without government contracts. Silicon Valley does not need the Pentagon to initiate these endeavors.