Palmer Luckey, a defence-tech billionaire appointed by Donald Trump’s Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon’s review of future warfare, is an unlikely dog breeder. He has teamed up with Ben Lamm, whose biotech company Colossal is working on bringing the woolly mammoth back from extinction. Together they have launched Warhound, a start-up using frontier genetics technology to develop a new elite breed of service dog. Lamm has likened it to a “Captain America programme for dogs,” which makes it sound like it was concocted by a couple of overexcited 12-year-olds, but the company is no joke. With a valuation of roughly $1.2 billion and $200 million from investors including the CIA’s venture arm, In-Q-Tel, it will combine three cutting-edge technologies: gene editing, cloning, and external AI gear.

Warhound will collect stored cells from top-performing military dogs — mainly Belgian Malinois and German Shepherds, plus some Labradors. These cells will be edited using Colossal’s CRISPR gene-editing tools, before being cloned into puppies by cloning company, ViaGen. The dogs will then be fitted with military gear from Luckey’s defence company, Anduril, including body armour and sensors linked to AI battlefield systems.

At first glance, it feels ethically dubious — are a couple of tech billionaires toying with an X-Men fantasy? Lamm has described the short-term aim as keeping dogs in top physical condition for longer by cutting harmful genetic markers such as hip dysplasia, certain cancers and poor eyesight. The company says animal welfare is central and American Humane certifies its training.

But while the initial efforts are focused on health, Lamm’s ambition is to create what he calls “a new type of dog”, with improved speed and agility, a sharper sense of smell and greater heat tolerance. This slippery shift from wellbeing to enhancement is being explored by many emerging technologies that call into question ethical taboos. Companies in the US offer polygenic screening, where couples can rank their IVF embryos after having them genetically analysed. The process initially focused on selecting embryos that didn’t predict harmful genetic diseases, but those with money to spend can now select for height, IQ and more. Ethicists are divided on where the taboo should hold. Oxford ethicist Julian Savulescu argues couples should select the child “expected to have the best life”, while Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel counters we should accept children “as they come, not as objects of our design”.

But avoiding taboos won’t stop these technologies from quietly emerging. AI’s arms race with China has already shown that technological acceleration in the name of competition will take precedence over social anxieties. The rapidly developing field of biological technology is no different, and China is pushing ahead. In 2023, a team linked to the Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing inserted a water bear gene into human cells and reported greater resistance to radiation. Researchers noted it could help Chinese soldiers survive nuclear fallout.

Military eugenics could easily evolve from breeding war dogs to engineering super-soldiers, all under the justification of keeping pace with China. At the same time, wealthy parents will increasingly have the means to select for intelligence and other desirable traits in their children. Avoiding a difficult conversation is not the same as having an ethical position. We need to confront these questions openly: which forms of human enhancement are we prepared to accept, who gets to decide, and under what safeguards? We need to establish those boundaries before geopolitical competition and commercial interests establish them for us.