The Arghast-Vuln Corporation is one of two tech conglomerates that was responsible for the Morph Crisis and ultimately the Great Disappearance. Arghast-Vuln was, at the time, owned by 'young' protégé Asher Vuln and allegedly wizened businessman Jacob Arghast. Asher took over his position after his father and Arghast's partner, Misha Vuln, died of cancer at the age of 124 after running the corporation for over a century.

Arghast was in his sixties, and Asher Vuln in his late twenties. Misha Vuln had always been the silent partner to the well-known Arghast, who became notorious as a businessman with such ruthless acumen that he and his mother Elaine Penn Arghast were often credited with solidifying corporate control over the Union. Jacob, for his part, strengthened lobbying efforts and maneuvered corporate patsies into major positions within the Union, allowing his company to become a near-monopoly in the final days of the Union. Through brutal mergers and relentless marketing, Arghast-Vuln pushed practically every other competitor out of the market, save for their equally massive and equally vicious competitors, Paragon Systems.

Arghast-Vuln produced and sold the most civilian-issue spaceships of any corporation, as well as the majority of warp drives, energy shield devices, and countless other products intended mostly for the civilian market. Although Arghast-Vuln and Paragon Systems publicly performed an intense marketing rivalry that portrayed them as fierce competitors, the two colluded more often than not to engage in insider trading and price fixing, and hid from accusations of monopolism through this veneer of supposed competition.

Paragon Systems Incorporated, for their part, was not truly a competitor to Vuln. Though the two overlapped in their target markets at times, Paragon mostly focused on defense contracts and military-grade equipment, whereas Arghast-Vuln had mostly cornered the civilian market. PSI was a far different and less public-facing corporation; it was controlled not by visible business partners but by a shadowy board whose members were virtually unknown to the public. Its insignias lurked on the undersides of practically every military-grade vessel, and Paragon manufactured countless weapons, vehicles, tools, and AI systems for the military.

Both corporations behaved increasingly unethically as the 'Corporate Age' progressed, with Arghast-Vuln engaging in extreme anti-competition measures and pushing into experimental markets far ahead of anyone else such that no one could compete, and Paragon engaging in unethical labor practices that would make even the most heartless businessman double-take.

Paragon was exposed in a massive bust close to the Great Disappearance for creating what were effectively illegal labor camps through delicately designed contracts that were intended to exploit legal loopholes that Paragon's politicians had opened up for them. Paragon would have prospective workers sign waivers and contracts that would open them up to being held on distant worlds for years at a time, working under extreme conditions in Paragon labor camps. Paragon preferred to run these corporate cities on distant worlds, disconnected from the Omniscience network, rather than risk surveillance of their corporation through artificial-intelligence systems, so these camps often supported their most secretive projects. Many of the survivors of the Great Disappearance originate in these labor camps.

Together, the two share culpability for the Morph crisis. Eager to corner another market before any competitor could become involved, Arghast-Vuln rushed Morph to market. Paragon, for their part, constructed CAIRN and sold it to the government, despite being fully aware that it could perform erratically under extreme conditions--they figured it was so unlikely that such conditions could come to pass that there was no point in restricting the technology.