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  • OpenAI Is Working With Anduril to Supply the US Military With AI

    OpenAI Is Working With Anduril to Supply the US Military With AI

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    OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and one of the most prominent artificial intelligence companies in the world, said today that it has entered a partnership with Anduril, a defense startup that makes missiles, drones, and software for the United States military. It marks the latest in a series of similar announcements made recently by major tech companies in Silicon Valley, which has warmed to forming closer ties with the defense industry.

    “OpenAI builds AI to benefit as many people as possible, and supports US-led efforts to ensure the technology upholds democratic values,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said in a statement Wednesday.

    OpenAI’s AI models will be used to improve systems used for air defense, said Brian Schimpf, cofounder and CEO of Anduril, in the statement. “Together, we are committed to developing responsible solutions that enable military and intelligence operators to make faster, more accurate decisions in high-pressure situations,” he said.

    OpenAI’s technology will be used to “assess drone threats more quickly and accurately, giving operators the information they need to make better decisions while staying out of harm’s way,” says a former OpenAI employee who left the company earlier this year and spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their professional relationships.

    OpenAI altered its policy on the use of its AI for military applications earlier this year. A source who worked at the company at the time says some staff were unhappy with the change, but there were no open protests. The US military already uses some OpenAI technology, according to reporting by The Intercept.

    Anduril is developing an advanced air defense system featuring a swarm of small, autonomous aircraft that work together on missions. These aircraft are controlled through an interface powered by a large language model, which interprets natural language commands and translates them into instructions that both human pilots and the drones can understand and execute. Until now, Anduril has been using open source language models for testing purposes.

    Anduril is not currently known to be using advanced AI to control its autonomous systems or to allow them to make their own decisions. Such a move would be more risky, particularly given the unpredictability of today’s models.

    A few years ago, many AI researchers in Silicon Valley were firmly opposed to working with the military. In 2018, thousands of Google employees staged protests over the company supplying AI to the US Department of Defense through what was then known within the Pentagon as Project Maven. Google later backed out of the project.

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  • Palmer Luckey Is Bringing Anduril Smarts to Microsoft’s Military Headset

    Palmer Luckey Is Bringing Anduril Smarts to Microsoft’s Military Headset

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    When Palmer Luckey was hacking together virtual reality headsets at his startup Oculus VR in the mid-2010s, he would sometimes imagine a future in which US soldiers used the technology to sharpen their battlefield senses.

    That vision is now virtually a reality after a deal that will bring software from his defense startup, Anduril, to a US Army head-mounted display developed by Microsoft.

    “The idea is to enhance soldiers,” Luckey tells WIRED over Zoom from his home in Newport Beach, California. “Their visual perception, audible perception—basically to give them all the vision that Superman has, and then some, and make them more lethal.”

    Luckey cofounded Anduril in 2017, after selling Oculus VR to Facebook for a reported $2 billion. His new company set out to challenge incumbent defense contractors by moving swiftly and efficiently, focusing more on software, and adapting technologies from the tech industry for military use.

    While known primarily for drones and air defenses, Anduril’s core offering is Lattice, a suite of software that powers those tools and a platform that can integrate with third-party systems. With today’s announcement, Lattice will be implemented in the Integrated Visual Augmentation System headset. Developed by Microsoft for the US military in 2021 and based on the company’s Hololens system, IVAS is an augmented-reality display that blends virtual information with a user’s view of the real world.

    Lattice will surface a lot more live information—pulled from drones, ground vehicles, or aerial defense systems—for soldiers wearing IVAS. This would include data showing the movement of drones and loitering munitions, electronic warfare attacks, and the activities of autonomous systems, Anduril says. It could alert them to incoming drones beyond their visual range that have been detected by an air defense system, for instance.

    Luckey notes that he was far from the first person to envision such futuristic combat scenarios. As is often the case, he drifts between science fiction and reality without much pause. “This is a classic sci-fi concept,” Luckey says. “Robert Heinlein was the one who pioneered the application of heads-up displays as applied to infantry in the 1950s novel Starship Troopers.”

    The Anduril cofounder certainly looks like a new kind of defense tech executive, wearing his customary Hawaiian shirt and sporting a bold hairstyle combo of both a mullet and a goatee. He is, however, quite confident in his ability to shake things up. “I am one of the smartest people in the VR industry, I think,” he says. “And if that sounds arrogant, remember that it takes arrogance to start a company like Anduril.”

    At the time of Anduril’s founding, some people scoffed at the idea of Silicon Valley engineers mastering military technology. But with the Pentagon increasingly keen on low-cost, autonomous, and software-defined systems, Anduril has made a name for itself. The startup recently beat several major companies, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman, to win a contract to develop an experimental “collaborative” robotic fighter jet for the US Air Force and Navy.

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  • Anduril Is Building Out the Pentagon’s Dream of Deadly Drone Swarms

    Anduril Is Building Out the Pentagon’s Dream of Deadly Drone Swarms

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    When Palmer Luckey cofounded the defense startup Anduril in 2017, three years after selling his virtual reality startup Oculus to Facebook, the idea of a twentysomething from the tech industry challenging the giant contractors that build fighter jets, tanks, and warships for the US military seemed somewhat far-fetched. Seven years on, Luckey is showing that Anduril can not only compete with those contractors—it can win.

    Last month, Anduril was one of two companies, along with the established defense contractor General Atomics, chosen to prototype a new kind of autonomous fighter jet called the Collaborative Combat Aircraft, or CCA, for the US Air Force and Navy. Anduril was chosen ahead of a pack of what Beltway lingo dubs “defense primes”—Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrup Grummond.

    “Anduril is proving that with the right team and business model, a seven-year-old company can go toe-to-toe with players that have been around for 70+,” Luckey wrote on social media platform X shortly after the contract was announced. The company declined to make anyone available for this article.

    That business model has seen Anduril focus on showing that it can rapidly deliver drones, submarines, and other hardware infused with advanced software at relatively low cost. It also reflects a shift in America’s war-fighting outlook toward quicker development of less expensive systems that feature more software and autonomy.

    Investors seem to think it’s working. Anduril has raised a total of $2.3 billion in funding, according to Pitchbook which tracks startup investment and, according to The Information, is seeking $1.5 billion more.

    Courtesy of U.S. Department of Defense

    Anduril’s prototype CCA aircraft, named Fury, is still at an early stage of development. Another test aircraft will be developed by General Atomics, a 68-year-old defense firm with a history of making remotely operated systems that include the MQ-9 Reaper, which played a key role in the US expansion of drone warfare in the 2000s.

    The US Air Force wants the new CCA drones to be more capable and more independent than existing uncrewed craft, which still depend heavily on ground staff. They are envisioned performing a wide range of missions, including reconnaissance, air strikes, and electronic warfare—either alone or in collaboration with aircraft piloted by a human or autonomously. A core part of the program is developing new artificial intelligence software to control the aircraft that can operate autonomously in a wider range of situations than existing military systems, which are typically autonomous only in narrow circumstances.

    “This is a big shift,” says Stacie Pettyjohn, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security , a Washington, DC, think tank. She says that the US military has so far mostly used AI for target recognition and planning rather than for controlling systems. The CCA project is “a huge step forward for uncrewed systems and for the Air Force and Navy,” she says.



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