Tag Archives: Anduril Industries

When Do You Know You Are a Clown? the case of Anduril

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Anduril Industries, a U.S. company, has promised to deliver hardware and software that will usher in a new era of autonomous warfare with the speed that only a startup can offer…But…As the U.S. Navy was attempting to launch 30 drone boats in May 2025, the boats rejected their inputs and automatically idled, making them “dead” in the water. The botched experiment quickly became a potential hazard to other vessels in the exercise. Military personnel scrambled overnight to clean up the mess, towing the boats to shore until 9 a.m. the next day. 

The drone boats were relying on autonomy software called Lattice made Anduril Industries. The Navy said the exercise was handled safely, but the incident alarmed Navy personnel, who said in a routine follow-up report that company representatives had misguided the military. In comments that were unusual for such a report, which was viewed by The Wall Street Journal, four sailors warned of “continuous operational security violations, safety violations, and contracting performer misguidances (Anduril Industries).” If the software configuration wasn’t immediately corrected and vetted, they wrote, there would be “extreme risk to force and potential for loss of life.”

Excerpt from Shelby Holliday et al., ‘We Do Fail … a Lot’: Defense Startup Anduril Hits Setbacks With Weapons Tech, WSJ, Nov. 27, 2025

The Elite of the Elite: Musk, Thiel, Andreessen, Luckey

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Since January 2025, more than three dozen employees and associates of Musk and fellow tech titans Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Palmer Luckey have been tapped for roles at federal agencies critical to their businesses, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. The roles put them in departments that oversee, regulate and award business to the four men’s companies, according to personnel appointments, lawsuits, ethics disclosures and contract data, creating a web of potential conflicts that ethics experts call unprecedented.

The group includes current and former employees as well as lawyers, investors and financial advisers of the tech executives. They make up most of the identified people working for the Department of Government Efficiency, the powerful cost-cutting task force created to streamline federal bureaucracy… Others have been appointed to key roles across the government.

Companies founded, owned or invested in by Musk, Thiel, Andreessen and Luckey have won more than a dozen federal contracts totaling about $6 billion since President Trump’s inauguration, and are pursuing billions more… Their business interests are often intertwined: Musk’s SpaceX was backed by Thiel’s Founders Fund and Andreessen’s a16z; both venture funds also backed Anduril Industries, a defense-tech startup co-founded by Luckey.

Excerpt from Shane Shifflett et al., Silicon Valley’s New Hold on Washington, WSJ, May, 16, 2025

Who is Ready for War with China in 2027: Venture Capitalists

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Anduril Industries—named after a magical sword from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” novels—is central to Silicon Valley’s quest to take on weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Since its founding in 2017, Anduril has raised $3.7 billion in venture funding, incl The newcomers’ hope is that the Pentagon will eventually kill off what Luckey, the CEO of Anduril, calls “old legacy zombie programs,” like expensive jet fighters and attack helicopters, and instead buy autonomous weapons, like drones and uncrewed submarines. The U.S. military, Luckey and others say, needs large numbers of cheaper and more intelligent systems that can be effective over long stretches of ocean and against a manufacturing and technological power like China. 

Many teams inside Anduril are building only weapons that can be completed by 2027—the year Chinese President Xi Jinping has said his country should be prepared to invade Taiwan. The fictional sword for which Anduril is named is also called the “Flame of the West.” For decades, the U.S. government funded defense companies, like Lockheed Martin, to develop new weapons, ranging from stealth aircraft to spy satellites. But as the private-sector money available for research and development has outstripped federal-government spending, particularly in areas like AI, a new cohort of defense startups is using private capital to develop technology for the Pentagon. The amount of private capital flowing into the venture-backed defense-tech industry has ballooned, with investors spending at least 70% more on the sector each of the past three years than any prior year. From 2021 through mid-June 2024, venture capitalists invested a total of $130 billion in defense-tech startups, according to data firm PitchBook. The Pentagon spends about $90 billion on R&D annually.

The Pentagon is credited with helping to create Silicon Valley by plowing money into tech companies in the 1950s and ’60s, investing in electronics and buying microchips used in nuclear-missile guidance systems, satellites, and computers. That investment, says Paul Bracken, an emeritus professor of management and political science at Yale University, led the Defense Department to become, in effect, the “mother of all venture-capital firms.”

Excerpt from Sharon Weinberger, Tech Bros Are Betting They Can Help Win a War With China, WSJ, Aug. 9, 2024