Palmer Luckey wears a uniform. The 34-year-old billionaire co-founder of Anduril Industries, one of the most attention-grabbing military contractors of the new century, has an image as carefully cultivated as that of any pop singer or TikTok influencer. For him, it’s a head-to-toe look meant to communicate that he’s a devil-may-care, bad-boy wunderkind: flip-flops, cargo shorts, Hawaiian shirts, and one of the world’s most unfortunate goatees. “Wow,” we’re meant to say, “No corporate suits for this rebellious corporate executive! He must be disrupting left and right as he shapes our future!”
That assessment wouldn’t be entirely wrong. Luckey is one of the most important members of an influential cadre of right-wing tech entrepreneurs, but his business isn’t apps or social networks – it’s killing machines. Anduril (yes, it’s a Lord of the Rings reference, seldom a good sign) makes military surveillance systems and drones of all kinds, all promoted with slick videos and a patriotic pitch. And while the world debates what kind of limits ought to be placed on artificial intelligence systems to ensure that they serve our interests without threatening what we value, Luckey’s answer to that question is essentially “let it rip”. He has said “there will be people who are killed by AI who should not have been killed. That is a certainty if artificial intelligence becomes a core part of the way that we fight wars.” He wants the weapons he sells to move as quickly as possible toward maximal autonomy – which will eventually mean making the decision to kill with little or no human oversight.
He has said “when it comes to life and death decision-making, I think that it is too morally fraught an area, it is too critical of an area, to not apply the best technology available to you, regardless of what it is” and that “there’s no moral high ground to making a landmine”, rather than a more intelligent weapon. His argument is that autonomy already exists in military tech, that Western countries can’t avoid using autonomous weapons if adversaries are and that AI may make better decisions than panicked or poorly-informed weapons.
Luckey has the classic Silicon Valley origin story: smart kid who loves technology invents something, gets too rich too fast, then finds himself catapulted to a status in the world that would warp the brain of even the most well-adjusted adult. In his case, the invention was the Oculus virtual reality headset. The start-up Luckey created as a teenager to sell his device was bought in 2014 by Facebook for $2bn, making him a multimillionaire and bringing him inside one of the world’s most profitable corporations.
He chafed at Facebook’s culture, and after an internal controversy over his support of Donald Trump in the 2016 election (this was before Silicon Valley took its dramatic turn to the right), Facebook fired him in 2017 without a public explanation. Luckey insists it was political. Facebook denies it fired Luckey for his views.
He came out on the right end of that argument, because most of the top leaders in Silicon Valley now – including Luckey’s old boss Mark Zuckerberg, but also Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk – have found their inner conservative and tied themselves closely to the Trump administration.
As Luckey told 60 Minutes last year, he was happy to see all those tech leaders lined up behind Trump at his inauguration, because it shows that the industry is aligned with the will of the public. “It is not good for you to have techno-corpo-elites that are radically out of step with where the American people are.”
Whether he still believes that now that Trump’s approval rating is in the mid-30s and Republicans are headed for a thrashing in the midterm elections is unclear. But after leaving Facebook, Luckey soon found his new calling as a weapons manufacturer and a political identity as a staunch Republican; election records show he has made over a thousand donations to Republican candidates and committees since 2017, including 23 gifts that each exceeded $100,000.
There, too, Luckey and Anduril differ from buttoned-up defence contractors such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics: those companies always cultivated bipartisanship in their rhetoric and largesse; even if Republicans are more likely to favour unending increases in military spending, it pays to spread the patronage to both sides of the aisle. Luckey’s proud partisanship, on the other hand, is in keeping with the new Trumpian tech barons. And when he says the giant military contractors move too slowly as they suck up billions of taxpayer dollars, he isn’t wrong.
According to the , it was Luckey who suggested to Donald Trump that he change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War (reverting the name to what it had been until Harry Truman changed it in the wake of the Second World War). Give him points for honesty: only a tiny portion of the vast American war machine is actually oriented toward defending America from attack, while most of it serves the goal of projecting American power outward. And that machine will keep growing; the military budget for 2026 approached $1trn (not including the cost of the Iran war), and Trump wants to increase it to a staggering $1.5trn.
All that money pays for a lot of fancy toys that make things go boom, and Palmer Luckey is eager to produce them. “There are actually things I would like to build,” he told , “that they [the Pentagon] do think are beyond the pale”. That disturbing notion aside, he and his company are at the heart of an emerging transition toward autonomous weapons, one that may make future conflicts even more likely.
That’s because the prospect of casualties often stays the hand of leaders contemplating military action – not casualties among the civilian population where the war will take place, but casualties among the aggressor’s military. Yes, there are leaders like Vladimir Putin willing to send thousands of their own troops to their deaths, but most worry about the domestic consequences of a costly war. If a president or prime minister can convince themselves that the next adventure will feature no soldiers coming home in body bags, why not go right ahead? As Luckey told 60 Minutes: “It’s the AI on board all these weapons that makes it possible to make it” – meaning waging war – “so easy”.
A safer world, he said in that interview, is one where the US and its allies have as many weapons as possible, so they can be “prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on”. And the more weapons the better; America, he said, should “transition from being the world police to the world gun store”.
One need only look at the homicide rate in the US (more than five times the rate in the UK) to see whether selling everyone more guns makes the world safer. But the world he imagines is one where autonomous robots traverse land, sea and air, raining death upon whoever those who bought the robots decide is their enemy. Even if drones are the future of warfare (as the wars in Ukraine and Iran are demonstrating), Luckey believes the US can prevail if it has more, and more lethal, robots than anyone.
Poised at the brink of that transition, Palmer Luckey couldn’t be more optimistic. Anduril is growing fast; it has over 7,000 employees, and is building an enormous factory in Ohio it says will employ up to 4,000 more. The weapons contracts from the US government are rolling in, and the UK Ministry of Defence is buying Anduril systems, too. Though it is still a private company, based on its venture funding Anduril is now seeking a $100bn valuation, matching the market capitalisation of giant defence contractors with many times the revenue.
At the heart of it all is artificial intelligence software that will make more and more battlefield decisions on its own; just point your drone in the right direction, then sit back and watch the destruction – and inevitably, the killing – unfold.
AI advocates would say that because these new weapons are smarter and more precise than those of the past, there will be fewer civilian casualties. Perhaps – but there may be more wars of all kinds. So, when Luckey says he’s helping to create the future, it isn’t hard to believe him. It’s just that the future looks pretty frightening.