A Bloomberg investigation by Jamie Tarabay published this week profiles Strider Technologies, a Sandy, Utah firm that has built a private-sector version of what spy agencies do for nation states. Strider has been operating quietly for nearly a decade. On Thursday, it launched its first agentic AI capability, an operating system that orchestrates the company's data, models, and products into what amounts to autonomous strategic intelligence.

The customers already include the U.S. Air Force (more than $8 million in contracts), state governments, and NATO's Defence Innovation organization. The implications go far beyond defense procurement. Strider has commercialized counterespionage.

What It Actually Does

Strider's platform ingests billions of publicly available documents, corporate registries, trade records, and foreign-language filings. CEO Greg Levesque describes the result as "a digital twin of the industrial world down to the person level." Current and former employees of thousands of organizations, their suppliers, their technologies, their commercial relationships, all mapped continuously from public sources, in multiple languages. The new agentic operating system sits on top of that data and acts on it without continuous human direction.

The Bloomberg piece opens with a case study. Investigators in Utah's Department of Public Safety were trying to figure out who really owned a motorsports park about 40 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. Utah in 2023 had banned U.S. adversaries (China, Iran, North Korea, Russia) from purchasing land. The park's tracks lay within sight of an ammunition depot belonging to the U.S. military. Utah officials had used corporate and employment records to find the owners, but the trail ended at a company called Mitime Utah Investment LLC whose principals held U.S. passports.

Strider's platform traced Mitime's ownership structure back to entities with direct contracts and personnel ties to the Chinese government and military. "It generated an overwhelming amount of information," Tanner Jensen, head of the department, told Bloomberg. The land sale was blocked.

The Privatization of Intelligence

The business of tracking state actors, mapping their front companies, identifying their agents, following their acquisition of foreign technology, has traditionally been conducted exclusively by government intelligence agencies, funded by taxpayers, operating under classified mandates. What they knew, they largely could not share. What they could not share, industry could not use. Strider has created a private, high-margin business out of what was once a public function and placed that capability within reach of any organization that can afford membership.

NATO confirmed it works with Strider on "risk evaluation, strategic intelligence and economic security capabilities." The alliance would not disclose the size of its contract. The company's growing list of former international intelligence officials joining its ranks signals where the talent flow is going: from agencies into private platforms.

The Concerns

Jennifer King, a data privacy fellow at Stanford University, told Bloomberg the platform raises serious questions: "It is a very powerful way of conducting generalized surveillance, and what specifically concerns me is that the general public has no idea what data is collected about them for these purposes, or how to defend against it."

Strider's work in such sensitive areas raises questions about what would happen in the event of a significant breach, a hostile acquisition, or legal process in a jurisdiction whose government is among those Strider tracks. Levesque said the company's architecture is built around redundancy, encryption, and a "zero-touch" model in which Strider does not actually ingest or store customer data. Its terms of service are designed to operate within established legal frameworks. Its analyses, he said, provide "risk signals, not automated conclusions, to support human decision-making."

Why This Matters

The Strider story is the natural endpoint of three converging trends. First, the U.S. government has been pushing American business to decouple from China, particularly in sensitive industries. Second, the volume of public data has exploded to the point that pattern-matching across it requires AI, not human analysts. Third, AI systems good enough to perform that pattern-matching at scale have become commercially available. Strider is what happens when those three lines intersect.

The next questions are governance questions. Who audits the algorithms that decide a piece of land is too risky to sell? Who reviews the corporate maps that determine a supplier should be cut off? Who has visibility into the criteria a private intelligence platform uses to label an entity as a national security risk? These are the questions democratic societies have spent decades developing answers for in the public sector. The private sector is now building infrastructure that may demand those answers all over again.

Strider is not Palantir. Its data sources are purely public, its model is membership-based, and it does not work directly inside government systems. But the broader pattern is the same: AI is making a category of work that used to require state-level resources accessible to anyone with a budget. The Air Force is paying $8 million for it. NATO is paying an undisclosed amount. State governments are paying their share. The question is what happens when the next customer is not a state, but a corporation, a campaign, or a competitor.