How Silicon Valley’s ‘Oppenheimer’ found lucrative trade in AI weapons – By Tabby Kinder (Financial Times) / March 28, 2024
Anduril Industries’ Palmer Luckey is leading the start-ups infiltrating the US government’s war machine
From below, the ALTIUS-600M looks like a black cross sailing through the sky. It has a slender fuselage and a stretched wingspan that makes it twice as wide as it is long. Up close, it’s a blend of metal and circuitry, a sleek and ominous testament to human ambition. It is also one of the first artificially intelligent weapons to be deployed by the US in a real war. Shot from a tube like a missile, first its wings telescope outwards, then it identifies its target, flying for up to 280 miles. It circles high in the sky, for as long as four hours, and then strikes on the ground. The “M” is for munitions; on impact it explodes in a ball of flames.
The attack drone is made by Anduril Industries, a defence company founded by a 31-year-old Californian inventor called Palmer Luckey. The US government has bought hundreds of ALTIUS-600Ms as part of its military aid packages to Ukraine. It is one of more than a dozen autonomous defence and weapons systems Anduril has built and sold to the Pentagon since it was founded in 2017. In that time, Luckey’s company has become one of the largest of only a handful of start-ups that have infiltrated the US government’s trillion-dollar war machine. The industry has been dominated for decades by an oligopoly of century-old contractors, known as “primes”, such as Lockheed Martin and Raytheon.
As conflicts multiply overseas, Anduril’s business is accelerating: annual revenues are projected to reach $1bn by 2026. “The first page of our first pitch deck said that Anduril will save western civilisation and save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year as we make tens and tens of billions of dollars a year,” Luckey says. “The intent is to go toe to toe with the major primes and try and fight our way to an equal footing.”
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