After a three-minute hype video consisting of HD footage of drones crashing and military vehicles exploding, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey took the stage at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, on Tuesday afternoon. The billionaire raged against America’s enemies, supported fully autonomous weapons and hinted at an Anduril IPO during an hour-long conversation with Pepperdine University President Jim Gash.
In 2017, Luckey co-founded the defense technology company Anduril with Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, Joe Chen, and Brian Schimpf, which was last valued at $14 billion. He made it clear that Anduril had no hesitation in creating weapons.
“Society has always needed a warrior class who are passionate and excited to inflict violence on others in pursuit of good goals,” he told Gash. “To protect freedom, we need people like me, who are sick like that, who don’t sleep and who create tools of violence.”
Luckey, dressed in his usual uniform of Hawaiian shirt and mullet, guided Gash through the early days of the war in Ukraine and why he believed Anduril could have had such a big impact. Luckey said he first met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019 after Zelenskyy 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 at the time wasn’t very interested in Ukraine,” Luckey said.
“If only we could have provided Ukraine with real-time intelligence, including target grade tracking, on all of Russia’s most critical weapons systems, days before their air force was eliminated, days before their long-range precision fires were exhausted,” he said. “I think that could really make a difference.”
According to Luckey, Anduril ended up supplying weapons to Ukraine in the second week of the war.
He then collaborated with many Silicon Valley founders to call for the development of unfettered AI (Anduril’s products are based on the AI platform Lattice). He claimed there is currently a “shadow campaign being carried out by many of our adversaries at the United Nations” to trick Western countries into not pursuing AI aggressively.
“(Our enemies) use very catchy phrases. ‘Can’t we agree that robots shouldn’t be able to decide who lives and dies?'” Luckey said. “And my point is, where’s the moral high ground in landmines that can’t tell the difference between a school bus full of kids and a Russian tank? .”
The development of fully autonomous weapons that require no human input as to who lives or dies is incredibly controversial. The U.S. government isn’t buying it, and Stephens, Anduril’s co-founder, has said he doesn’t want to build it. “Human judgment is incredibly important,” he told Kara Swisher last year. “We don’t want to get rid of it.”
Luckey ended the conversation by alluding to Anduril’s desire to eventually go public. “The reality is that for political reasons, practical reasons and financial reasons, private enterprise can never beat something like a trillion-dollar joint strike fighter (jet) effort,” he said. “It’s not going to happen. “Congress will not allow that to happen.”
People were thinking about the possibility of an acquisition. “It just points out what happened to me last time,” Luckey said, referring to how he was forced out of Facebook in 2016 after selling his previous startup, virtual reality company Oculus.
When he got up to leave, Gash tried to present him with a leather-bound “Lord of the Rings” collection, from which Luckey got the name “Anduril.” But Lucky politely declined. “I can’t put that on my motorcycle,” he said.
