I need your focus for a few minutes on something that slipped through the noise today, and may not get another window soon.
While Israel struck Iran and the United States moved in behind them, while every newsroom in the country was [rightly] covering one of the most consequential moments in years, Oracle Corporation quietly published a blog post announcing that the U.S. government had authorized it to run generative AI on federal government data. That means pattern recognition, automated data analysis, and decision-making tools now approved to operate on your Medicare records and military systems, cleared at the highest civilian and Department of Defense security levels. (And yes, Oracle also just took over the infrastructure running your Medicaid and ACA data — that happened this week too, and we’ll get there.)
The AI running on the classified side is Grok, built by Elon Musk’s xAI, hosted on Larry Ellison’s cloud, processing Top Secret American intelligence data. That went live today. While you were watching Tehran.
There are a lot of parallels between what’s unfolding with Iran right now and the early days of Iraq, and one of them is this: the last time the country was consumed by a war in the Middle East, Ellison quietly built a surveillance state in Britain while nobody was paying attention. He poured roughly £270 million into the Tony Blair Institute, whose staff embedded themselves in NHS and immigration policy working groups, and what came out the other end wasn’t just cloud contracts — it was a mandatory national digital ID scheme that links a citizen’s employment history, benefits, healthcare records, and physical movement into a single government-accessible identity. A wallet on your phone that the state can read. Civil liberties groups called it a surveillance architecture. Nearly three million people signed a petition against it. Oracle holds over a billion pounds in UK government contracts and the infrastructure is already built. I covered that story in full HERE. The reason it matters right now is that he is running the same play, in the same window, in this country.
There is a window closing, and most people don’t know it’s open.
So here’s the context you need. Larry Ellison founded Oracle Corporation, still runs it as chairman and CTO, and is currently the third richest person in the world. His son David runs Paramount, which just completed a months-long hostile takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery — outmaneuvering Netflix, raising its offer nine times, and paying $2.8 billion just to break Warner Bros. out of a signed deal. Yesterday, February 27th, Warner Bros. Discovery’s board finally said yes. At $111 billion it’s the largest media merger in American history, bringing HBO, Max, CNN, Warner Bros. Pictures, DC, CBS, Paramount+, MTV, and Nickelodeon together under one company. The cloud infrastructure it all runs on is Oracle, which Paramount has already been migrating to at $100 million a year.
I’ve been deep in the media side of this merger for months, focusing on the CNN restructuring, what consolidation at this scale means for journalism, etc. and that story is real and worth your attention. But there’s a whole other dimension I’d been underweighting, and it came into focus when I was reading an analyst report about the sheer volume of data Oracle stands to absorb when this deal closes. Once I saw the full picture of what they already hold and what they’re about to add, the merger stopped looking like a media story with a cloud footnote and started looking like a data acquisition with a media acquisition attached to it.
Here is what happened in the last seventeen days: On February 11th, Oracle won a landmark contract from CMS to host Medicare, Medicaid, CHIP, and ACA marketplace data for more than 150 million Americans. On February 12th, the Air Force awarded Oracle an $88 million task order for Cloud One, its classified cloud platform spanning Top Secret and Special Access Program workloads across the entire Department of Defense. Yesterday, February 27th, Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery signed their merger agreement — $111 billion, the largest media deal in American history, with Oracle as the cloud infrastructure the entire combined company will run on. And today, February 28th, Oracle published the blog post authorizing generative AI to process federal government data at the highest civilian and DoD security clearance levels.
HBO, Max, CNN, Warner Bros. Pictures, DC, CBS, Paramount+, MTV, Nickelodeon, the health records of 150 million Americans, Top Secret military intelligence. Same company. Same family. Seventeen days.
A Man Who Already Told You His Plans
The media monopoly concerns around this merger are real and I’ve written about them. But it wasn’t until last night, reading an analyst report about the volume of data Oracle is about to absorb, that the fuller picture came into focus for me. Because layered underneath the media story is a data story, and that’s the one I want to walk through.
Oracle’s first customer was the CIA (the company is literally named after a CIA database project from 1977) and it has never really left that world. Between 2014 and 2024, Oracle quietly built one of the most powerful private data collection operations on the planet by buying companies most people have never heard of. BlueKai tracked your browsing through invisible pixels on sites like Amazon and ESPN. Datalogix connected your online behavior to your credit card purchases and loyalty cards. AddThis — those small share buttons on every website — fingerprinted your actual device using a technique so invasive that ProPublica described it as virtually impossible to block, and found it on the White House website and YouPorn in the same sweep.
Oracle merged all of them into the Oracle Data Cloud and built what a federal lawsuit later called “digital dossiers” on the public. Ellison told investors in 2016 that Oracle had data on five billion consumers. The whole operation ended in a $115 million settlement.
Advertising turned out to be just the first market for that kind of data. Governments were always going to be the second — deeper pockets, fewer regulations, and no one to tell you to stop because the regulator and the customer are the same entity.
That’s why Ellison was in Dubai in 2025, standing before heads of state, pitching a vision where every nation unifies all citizen data (including genomic data) into a single AI-accessible database. And it’s why he told investors in 2024 that citizens would be “on their best behavior because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything.” He told you what he wants. On camera. Twice.
The Permission Slip
Oracle has always said its federal and commercial cloud environments are physically separate, and at the server level that’s true. The same company runs both sides, though — the same executives, the same AI teams. And last October, Ellison stood on stage and told a room full of people that Oracle’s databases already contain “most of the world’s high-value private data” and that the company’s entire future is running AI across it.
That was the vision. Today’s AI authorization was the permission slip. And no firewall between Oracle’s federal, commercial, and media environments has been proposed, required, or disclosed; not by Oracle, not by the merger parties, not by anyone.
Then there’s the financing, which makes the conflict of interest impossible to miss. Ellison is personally guaranteeing $44.6 billion of this acquisition using his Oracle shares as collateral. Those shares hold their value because of Oracle’s federal contracts. So the government pays Oracle, which supports the stock, which Ellison pledges to finance his son’s media empire, which runs on Oracle. In the merger filings, Oracle is listed as a neutral third-party vendor. It is the infrastructure, the collateral, and the beneficiary of the same deal.
$24 billion of the financing is coming from Gulf sovereign wealth funds: Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, Qatar. The same governments Ellison pitched his unified citizen database to in Dubai. The same funds co-investing in Stargate and managing the TikTok joint venture. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is the cap table.
A Standard That Already Exists
Here’s the thing — we actually have a template for how to handle Oracle holding this much reach over an American audience. When the government gave Oracle control over TikTok, it required an oversight board, algorithm audits, source code inspections, and data isolation. The combined Paramount–Warner Bros. will reach a comparable or larger American audience with far more first-party data, and no equivalent governance has been proposed, required, or even discussed. The shareholder vote is March 20th.
I’ve written a policy brief asking for three things: a formal conflict of interest review under existing law before the merger closes, data firewall requirements modeled on the TikTok standard, and Oracle treated as what it actually is — a related party, not a neutral vendor. I’m sending it to every member of the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, on both sides. Senator Booker has been pushing to get David Ellison under oath. Ellison declined. The March 4th hearing was canceled the moment the deal shifted from Netflix to Paramount.
Below this article you’ll find every senator’s name, office, and contact information, along with a message you can copy and send. It genuinely matters when constituents are asking the same questions a policy brief is raising.
TikTok Goes The Clock
A war starting is precisely the kind of event this strategy depends on. Congress moves toward the crisis in front of it, hearings fill with generals and diplomats, and the people building permanent infrastructure count on the weeks that follow to go unexamined. It has worked before.
The pipes are being built this week. Your health data, your entertainment, your news, your government’s secrets — all flowing through one company, one family, with AI now authorized to process it and nobody watching. If we don’t ask who should be allowed to own this infrastructure before March 20th, we’re not going to get another chance to ask.
I don’t want us to miss it.
My Policy Brief:
Prepared for the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights
How to Support This Research
Pick your senators. If one of your senators sits on the Antitrust Subcommittee (listed below), start with them — your message carries more weight as a constituent. If not, call any member of the subcommittee. They all have jurisdiction over this merger.
Use the contact form. Every senator’s office accepts messages through their website. Click the link next to their name below. You’ll be asked for your name, address, and a message.
Call if you can. Phone calls register more urgently than web forms. Call the DC office number listed below, tell the staffer that you’re calling about the Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger and Oracle’s conflicts of interest, and ask that the senator support a review before the deal closes. You don’t need a script (though I have something you can copy and paste from below), just be direct.
Feel free to share this article! The more people asking the same questions, the harder they are to ignore.
Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy, and Consumer Rights
Republican Members
Sen. Mike Lee — Utah (Chairman)
Phone: (202) 224-5444
Contact Senator Lee
Sen. Josh Hawley — Missouri
Phone: (202) 224-6154
Contact Senator Hawley
Sen. Thom Tillis — North Carolina
Phone: (202) 224-6342
Contact Senator Tillis
Sen. Eric Schmitt — Missouri
Phone: (202) 224-5721
Contact Senator Schmitt
Sen. Katie Boyd Britt — Alabama
Phone: (202) 224-5744
Contact Senator Britt
Sen. Ashley Moody — Florida
Phone: (202) 224-3041
Contact Senator Moody
Democratic Members
Sen. Cory Booker — New Jersey (Ranking Member)
Phone: (202) 224-3224
Contact Senator Booker
Sen. Amy Klobuchar — Minnesota
Phone: (202) 224-3244
Contact Senator Klobuchar
Sen. Richard Blumenthal — Connecticut
Phone: (202) 224-2823
Contact Senator Blumenthal
Sen. Peter Welch — Vermont
Phone: (202) 224-4242
Contact Senator Welch
Sen. Adam Schiff — California
Phone: (202) 224-3841
Contact Senator Schiff
Sample Message (Copy and Paste)
Subject: Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery Merger — Requesting Review Before March 20th
Dear Senator [Last Name],
I’m writing to ask that the Senate Antitrust Subcommittee review the proposed Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery merger before the shareholder vote on March 20th.
This is a $111 billion deal that would put HBO, CNN, CBS, Paramount+, Warner Bros. Pictures, and Nickelodeon under one company. That company is controlled by David Ellison, whose father Larry Ellison runs Oracle — the same company that serves as the cloud infrastructure for the merged entity, holds contracts processing Medicare and classified military data, and whose stock is being used as collateral to finance the deal. Oracle is listed in the merger filings as a neutral vendor. It is not neutral.
On the same day the U.S. launched strikes on Iran, Oracle received authorization to run AI on federal government data at the highest security levels. No data firewall between Oracle’s federal, commercial, and media environments has been proposed or required by anyone.
When Oracle took over TikTok, the government required an oversight board, algorithm audits, and data isolation. The combined Paramount–Warner Bros. will reach a comparable American audience with far more personal data, and no equivalent safeguards have even been discussed.
I’m asking you to support a conflict-of-interest review before this deal closes and to ensure Oracle is treated as what it is — a related party, not an independent vendor.
Thank you,
[Your Name]
[Your City, State]
