• In a college talk, Palmer Luckey criticized AI restrictions in military use.
• Luckey, founder of Anduril Industries, warned of adversaries like Russia and China using AI.
• Anduril, last valued at $14 billion, supplies autonomous tech to the US military and Ukraine.

The founder of one of the biggest defense tech startups slammed potential restrictions on the use of artificial intelligence in the military, saying that the US and its allies need AI to combat adversaries making use of the technology.

In a Tuesday talk at Pepperdine University, Palmer Luckey, the founder of Anduril Industries, said he fears that AI will be used by “evil people,” while Western powers are being coerced into not using AI.

“There is a shadow campaign being waged in the United Nations by many of our adversaries to trick Western countries that fancy themselves morally aligned into not applying AI for weapons or defense,” Luckey said.

“What is the moral victory in being forced to use larger bombs with more collateral damage because we are not allowed to use systems that can penetrate past Russian or Chinese jamming systems and strike precisely?” he added.

The 32-year-old founder slammed European countries, saying that they don’t understand how adversaries to the West, like Russia, China, and Iran, are using Europe to “cripple all of us.” He added that Iran is going to have access to great AI in the future, and that China already has great AI.

“You need the good people to have AI. You don’t want the bad people to have AI but they are going to have it,” Luckey said.

A $14 billion company with close ties to the government

Luckey founded Anduril in 2017, and the startup has since risen to the top of Silicon Valley’s latest crop of defense tech companies. He previously founded virtual reality company Oculus VR in 2012, which he sold two years later to Meta for $2 billion in cash and stock.

By 2019, Anduril had contracts with more than a dozen Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security agencies. In 2022, Anduril won a contract worth almost $1 billion with the Special Operations Command to support its counter-unmanned systems.

Anduril’s products include autonomous sentry towers along the Mexican border and Altius-600M attack drones supplied to Ukraine in their hundreds. During Tuesday’s talk, Luckey said that all of Anduril’s tech operates autonomously and runs on its AI platform, called Lattice.

In August, the company was valued at $14 billion in a Series F fundraising round co-led by Founders Fund and Sands Capital. Luckey has said that the company aims to go public soon.

Luckey is part of a larger group of Silicon Valley peers who advocate for the use of technology in the military — often products that they sell.

Alex Karp, the co-founder and CEO of Palantir, which produces counter-terrorism software, has repeatedly affirmed his support of the West, Ukraine, and Israel amid significant scrutiny of the company’s clients, including US immigration officials.

“We have a consistently pro-Western view that the West has a superior way of living and organizing itself, especially if we live up to our aspirations,” Karp said in a New York Times interview in August.

“If you believe we should appease Iran, Russia, and China by saying we’re going to be nicer and nicer and nicer, of course you’ll look at Palantir negatively,” he added.

One of Anduril’s cofounders and its current CEO, Brian Schimpf, was an early employee at Palantir.