After a three-minute hype video, complete with HD footage of drones colliding and military vehicles exploding, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey stepped onto the stage at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, on Tuesday afternoon. In an hour-long conversation with Pepperdine University president Jim Gash, the billionaire raged against America’s adversaries, endorsed completely autonomous weapons, and hinted at an Anduril IPO.
In 2017, Luckey co-founded defense tech company Anduril, last valued at $ 14 billion, with Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, Joe Chen, and Brian Schimpf. He made it clear he had no hesitation about Anduril building weapons.
“Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims,” he told Gash. “You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”
Luckey, donning his usual uniform of a Hawaiian shirt and mullet, walked Gash through the early hours of the war in Ukraine — and why he believes Anduril could’ve made a big impact. Luckey said he first met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019, after Zelenskyy had read about Anduril in a Wired article. He asked Luckey if Ukraine could acquire some of Anduril’s border control technology. “Unfortunately, the State Department wasn’t really wasn’t really keen on Ukraine at that point in time,” Luckey said.
“Look, if we were able to provide real-time intelligence with targeting-grade tracks of all of Russia’s most critical weapons systems to Ukraine days before their air force was eliminated, before their long range precision fires were exhausted, ” he said. “I think that could have made a really big difference.”
Anduril did end up supplying weapons to Ukraine by week two of the war, according to Luckey.
He then aligned himself with many Silicon Valley founders and called for unfettered AI development (Anduril’s products are powered by its AI platform, Lattice). He insisted there is currently “a shadow campaign being waged in the United Nations right now by many of our adversaries” to trick Western countries into not aggressively pursuing AI.
“[Our adversaries] use phrases that sound really good in a sound bite: ‘Well can’t you agree that a robot should never be able to decide who lives and dies?’” Luckey said. “And my point to them is, where’s the moral high ground in a landmine that can’t tell the difference between a school bus full of kids and a Russian tank?”
The development of completely autonomous weapons — weapons that do not need a human’s input on who lives or dies — is incredibly controversial. The US government does not purchase them, and even Anduril co-founder Stephens has said he would not want to build them. “Human judgment is incredibly important,” he told Kara Swisher last year. “We don’t want to remove that.”
Luckey ended the talk by hinting at Anduril’s desire to eventually go public. “The reality is for political reasons, practical reasons, financial reasons, a privately traded company is never going to win something like the trillion-dollar joint strike fighter [jet] effort,” he said. “It’s just not going to happen. Congress won’t allow it to happen.”
People have floated the possibility of being acquired. “I just point to how that went from me last time,” Luckey said, referencing how he was pushed out of Facebook in 2016 after selling his previous startup, virtual reality company Oculus.
As he got up to leave, Gash tried to gift him a leather-bound collection of “The Lord of the Rings,” which is where Luckey got the name “Anduril.” But Luckey politely declined. “I cannot fit that on my motorcycle,” he said.
