Palmer Luckey says Anduril is working on AI weapons that 'give us the ability to swiftly win any war'

Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus and Anduril Industries. Patrick T. Fallon/Getty Images

• Palmer Luckey says his defense tech startup is working on weapons that could change warfare.  
• Anduril specializes in autonomous drones, weaponry and surveillance devices.
• As AI-powered weapons advance, deterrence is key to national security, Luckey told the Financial Times.

A Silicon Valley defense tech startup is working on products that could have as great an impact on warfare as the atomic bomb, its founder Palmer Luckey said.

“We want to build the capabilities that give us the ability to swiftly win any war we are forced to enter,” he told the Financial Times.

The Anduril founder didn’t elaborate on what impact AI weaponry would have. But asked if it would be as decisive as the atomic bomb to the outcome of World War II he replied: “We have ideas for what they are. We are working on them.”

Luckey was 20 when he founded the virtual reality company Oculus VR in 2012, which he sold two years later to Meta for $2 billion in cash and stock.

He founded Anduril in 2017 and it’s since risen to the top of Silicon Valley’s defense tech boom.

By 2019 it had contracts with more than a dozen agencies of the Defense and the Homeland Security departments. And in 2022, Anduril won a contract worth almost $1 billion with the Special Operations Command to support its counter-unmanned systems.

Anduril’s products include autonomous sentry towers along the Mexican border, to Altius-600M attack drones supplied to Ukraine in their hundreds.

All of Anduril’s tech operates autonomously and runs on its AI platform called Lattice that can easily be updated.

The Anduril Long Range Sentry Tower uses AI to provide autonomous surveillance. Anduril

The speed and low cost of AI systems make them key to military deterrence in the modern age, Luckey told the FT.

“The thing that’s so powerful about autonomy is that you can clearly show your adversaries that you have weapons that do not cost all that much money and that don’t cost human life,” the Anduril founder said.

“It’s a powerful part of deterrence that the US has lost over time as our willingness for death has gone down and the cost of our systems has gone up.”

As the company wrote in a 2023 blog post: “Only superior military technology can credibly deter war.”

Defense-tech boom

The success of Anduril has given hope to other smaller players aiming to break into the defense sector.

As an escalating number of global conflicts has increased demand for AI-driven weaponry, venture capitalists have put more than $100 billion into defense tech since 2021, according to Pitchbook data.

The rising demand has sparked a fresh wave of startups lining up to compete with industry “primes” such as Lockheed Martin and RTX (formerly known as Raytheon) for a slice of the $842 billion US defense budget.

“The intent is to go toe to toe with the major primes and try and fight our way to an equal footing,” Luckey told the FT.

“The first page of our first pitch deck said that Anduril will save western civilization and save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year as we make tens and tens of billions of dollars a year,” he added.

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