Ask HN: Why is AI civil tech and not military first?

A lot of civilian tech started out for military use: rockets, Teflon (kind of), nuclear power (arguably), weather forecasting. There was a recent discussion about how much the CIA invested in NeXT. Now I look at OpenAI and Anthropic. They seem to build civilian products first and only later rent them out for military purposes / national security. Why not the other way around, military technology adapted for civilian use? It seems to me there is a lot of application. Robots, drones, surveillance. What am I missing?

No conspiracies please.