Anduril's Palmer Luckey on AI, nukes, and the war in Iran | The Axios Show

Intro and Anduril's identity

00:00- I would definitely build nuclear weapons. I would build fission weapons. I would build fusion weapons. - Do you think your bluntness comes across as rude or off-putting? - I think to certain people it definitely does.

00:17The next war-fighting domain, before it's the moon, is the subterranean domain." - Is it subterranean, then the moon? - Yeah, subterranean, then the moon.

00:27- Palmer Luckey, good to see you again, and welcome to the "Axios Show." - Thank you for having us on. - Thank you for having us on. - You are the founder and figurehead of Anduril Industries, among the splashiest, fastest growing, most pro-autonomy and polarizing defense contractors on the planet, I would hazard? - Wow, seven descriptors. - Yes, I'm big on adjectives. You have your haters and you have your hot takes, so I would like to lean into both if you're game. - I am always game to lean into the things that make me polarizing. - Fantastic.

Culture and effectiveness

01:01Describe for me Anduril in one sentence, one quick sentence. Anduril is a defense product company that spends its own money designing, developing, and shipping tools that will save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year as we make tens of billions of dollars a year, someday. - Someday. - We're not there yet. - Describe to me the culture in one word. - Effective. - Why? - Almost everything that we have here is oriented around what type of competence will lead to actually delivering things that actually work with the customer on a timeline that is relevant. we need to build tools that are effective. And sometimes something needs to come now rather than later to be effective. Sometimes it needs to be higher capability

01:42to be effective or not. Sometimes, if it's not cheap enough to buy in scale that matters, then it's not effective. We're about 20% veterans here. People are very close to the customers. They're very close to the deployments, and they understand, I think, a lot better than a lot of other companies, how the military is truly using our tools. We have people who are forward deployed. We have people who are overseas in the Middle East right now. We've had people who are in Ukraine since the second week of the war. And so I think we have a very good understanding of what it takes to be effective with our customers. And if we don't, we develop it. If we go and we learn that we are screwing it up, we put our own resources into fixing it.

Competing with defense primes

02:18- To zoom out on effective, where in the world have you been effective? Is that Ukraine with drones? Is that Australia with Ghost Shark? Is that the Middle East? - So we've been effective in, we've been effective in a lot of places. And, of course, we've had bouts where it was ineffective. You know, like I'd say we've been very effective in the Middle East right now. We've also had challenges in the past, and then we've surged resources to get that fixed, which is one of the reasons that things are working now. But I think we've been effective in Ukraine. Australia, we're really just beginning to deliver there, right? We've built a factory there. We've hired a large team there. We've developed this Ghost Shark program

02:57with them building robotic submarines at a very large scale, very quickly. We delivered the first submarine a year ahead of schedule. I don't know if I would say that's like effective yet, because Australia's not fighting anybody right now. And I think they hope to keep it that way. So it's hard to prove, but I think Ukraine, Taiwan, certainly the United States, we've proven that we are effective a number of times. Your competition in the defense contracting world includes the entrenched primes, the Lockheeds, - Sure. - The Northrops, the Boeings. If I'm a Pentagon buyer, why do I buy Anduril versus those guys? - So it depends on what you're doing. But, in general, the sense that a lot of people have in the Pentagon

03:38is that Anduril is a company that is going to move very, very quickly. We're gonna bring a lot of our own resources to bear on the project, and that even when programs have run into political problems, because we're willing to spend our own money as a product company continuing to keep things going, there's a number of programs that have survived political breaks that would've killed a lot of traditional cost-plus programs. And so I think a lot of the people in the program offices in the Pentagon that are making decisions, whether they're selecting Anduril or, let's say, keeping Anduril in the mix. You know, it's not always, "We're gonna award to Anduril," it's we're gonna select two or three companies

04:10to work on this. I think the reason we stay in that basket is they know that we'll move quickly. They know we'll put our own money in. They know that even when we run into political challenges, we're not gonna do a stop-work order. We're not gonna just shut down our lines. We're gonna keep moving and hope that we come out the other side. - You, Alex Karp at Palantir, Elon Musk, you all have a distinct style, a distinct tact. And you have said, you've described it in the past as a bit of a caricature. Do you need to be a bit of a caricature to run a successful defense company these days? - No. No. Some of the most successful defense companies I know are run by very competent operators. They're the most straight-laced guys you've ever seen.

Personality, marketing, and recruiting

04:45If you set us side by side, we'd look like a Japanese comedy duo, the straight man and the funny man playing off of each other. I don't think you need to be a larger-than-life character. I think that what you see is the larger-than-life characters are the ones that get the retweets or the Re-Truths. (chuckles) And the straight players typically don't. But that's also not what makes a company successful. the marketing that you get, that you see like on Twitter, it's primarily a recruiting engine. Like I'm not marketing to necessarily the guy who's buying my system. Like he's not the one who's, you know, checking out the hot takes. But for recruiting, it's helpful. Like Anduril being out there and having a position, for example,

05:27on who should have the final call on how to use autonomous weapons or being out there and having an opinion on what good manufacturing looks like, we are attracting the right people, and, I think, repelling the wrong people. Our company probably wouldn't have gotten a lot of our best talent if we weren't out there in that way. - What's the most badass thing Anduril has built? - I'm supposed to love all my children equally. - Everyone has a favorite child. - Everyone, everyone. It's true. The science bears it out. I think the coolest thing, you know, there's a bit of recency bias here, but I think that the coolest thing that we've built in my mind right now is Fury. It's an autonomous fighter jet

Fury and red lines on weapons

06:08for the United States Air Force. You know, we were competing with a lot of the big guys. And to go toe to toe with them and then get selected by the Air Force to deliver these prototypes to them was just the coolest thing ever. Only about half of our products are public, which is another thing that makes this difficult. But Fury was one where we went toe-to-toe with the big guys for their bread and butter, not like a side thing that they're not interested in, and we won. And that, to me, was very gratifying, for me, for the team working on the product, for all the other teams building mission systems and support stuff that went on the product, the people building the buildings that are being used to build the product.

06:49I think that that is one that everyone's still riding a bit of an emotional high on. - What won't you build? What's your red line? - What wouldn't I build? That's an interesting one. - Nuclear weapons. - I would definitely build nuclear weapons. I would build fission weapons. I would build fusion weapons. I think that nuclear weapons have been one of the most stabilizing forces in history ever. It's never been like that in history where total war is off the table. So fission weapons, fusion weapons, absolutely I would build them. I would probably not build, I would not build biological weapons. - Chemical weapons? - Chemical weapons I would build, but in a very specific vertical. And this is a very controversial thing,

07:25and please don't clip, "Yes, I would build chemical weapons," and put it on the Axios- - So I wanna be very, very specific about this. And so if you guys post it, you know, please include this as well. I'll give you an example. Pepper spray is illegal for most non-military police units to use in the military. So like certain MPs can use pepper spray. We are not able to use pepper spray, tear gas as part of our conventional offensive military tactics. I think that's a huge mistake. It falls under a lot of these chemical weapon prohibitions. And I understand the worries about fear of escalation or a slippery slope. I think we understand chemical weapons enough to know there's no real slippery slope

07:59from literally hot pepper juice to, you know, nerve, nerve agents that are going to kill you.

Pentagon vs. Anthropic

08:48- Do you think the Pentagon overstepped labeling the company a supply-chain risk? - I am of the mind that no. If anything, I think I may have been even more forceful in this rejection. And let me tell you why. The only reason you have not seen, I think, a larger defection from other companies that are worried about, you know, similar problems is because of the forceful reaction of the Department. The Department is saying, "We are not gonna let you slippery slope this. We're not gonna let one company get their special provisions, and then we're gonna have a different debate with a different company, a different debate with a different entity." Because these companies do have different values, right?

09:30They're not gonna all simultaneously agree, you know, "Anthropic's version of their limits is our version." What you end up with very quickly is a patchwork of different regulations across all these different companies. And the Department now has to ask, is this operation, is this planning element, is this tool compliant with these five different companies versions of what their limit is? And by the way, that version changes over time. They now have to weigh these things. Let's set aside the, you know, Anthropic was saying it's about offensive autonomous weapons with no human in the loop or about mass surveillance. There's a lot of questions there. Like, okay, what defines offensive? What defines no human in the loop?

10:09What defines weapon? What defines use, right? And I know this sounds a little bit like, you know, Bill Clinton, you know, depends on what the definition of is is thing, but these things really do matter. Imagine if it was something even more simple. A tech company said, "Department of War, I'll do anything that you want. We will not turn it off unless you target innocent civilians. We want it in paper that we can turn it off if you target innocent civilians." Well, what is targeting? Like, is it inadvertent versus explicit? What is innocence? Is it determined by the courts? Is it determined by the Hague? Is it determined by people in Brussels? Is it determined by Dario? What is a civilian? And who decides?

10:52What if there's civilian mixed in with other things? You run into these problems where, if you agree to this, you are giving more power to private companies, executives making billions off taxpayers than the president of the United States. They could just unilaterally, you know, pull the keys on stuff in a way that not even the commander-in-chief can do. I don't think that that's correct. I think that our military has to be accountable to our civilian elected leadership, not to corporations. - Do you think this is more a battle of policies or personalities? - Hmm. It's all, I mean, it's both, right? I mean, that's what politics is. I think that there are people who know how to, like, I bet there is somebody in the tech world,

11:31I don't know if it's me, somebody probably could have gotten something equivalent to those policies through by talking about it in exactly the right way, writing exactly the same thing, and making sure to not rub the wrong people the wrong way. Like there, there's a way where you could talk people through these things. Maybe you could say, "Oh, you know, we're gonna do this in a way that it's not taking authority away from you." Maybe it would be something like, instead of in our contract it says you can't do these things, it would say, you know, "We're handing this language over to Congress and should they ratify it, this is how it would go. But of course we want your input on what these things would be."

12:06So look, personalities always enter into it. So look, personalities always enter into it. I'd be naive to say otherwise. - And I think probably the personalities in this case did not approach this in the most collaborative way that they could, but in the end, I give the win to the Department, because they're the one that has to make sure that use of force and responsibility for force lies in the chain of command that is accountable to the people that we elect.

Iran and US war appetite

12:33- Another hot topic, Iran. - Sure. - Does does that require boots on the ground from the US to solve this? - Geez, I hope not. I mean, I don't think the United States has the political will to do it, whether it's good or bad. I've been saying this for years. I think after our adventures in the Middle East of the last couple decades have robbed America of its ability to sustain a boots-on-the-ground campaign. I think that what Trump's doing, like, you know, whether it's in Venezuela or Iran, it's a totally new type of warfare, but I think it's born of strategic realities, right? Like we do not have it in us to do this, for good reasons or bad. I don't think that we're ready to go fight, let's say World War II for the right reasons,

13:13much less reasons that not everyone agrees with. I think that we don't have another D-Day in us right now, and I think that's actually a bit of a problem. I think that it means that even in a very important fight, we might not show up, but it's one of the reasons I've been saying the United States probably needs to transition from being the world police to being the world gun store. We need to give the people that work with us, who have a stronger stake in these interests than even we do, the tools that they need to defend themselves and hopefully align with US interests. I don't think it's gonna go to boots on the ground. Maybe I'll be eating my words in a week, but I don't think that we have it in us.

13:47- So Trump ran as a bit of an anti-war president, some in MAGA- - And he and he did that even in the first one. You know, remember when Hillary Clinton was running and saying she would enforce a no-fly zone in Syria. And you had Trump saying, they'd say, "Well, well what would you do, you know, if you were president?" He said, "Well, I wouldn't start World War III." And, I have to admit, that resonated with me. I was like, you know what, that's probably the right attitude in terms of not starting wars needlessly, not expending munitions and arms and industrial capacity that we need to fight more important wars than that particular issue. - Is the Iran war an important one? - Here's the thing, I'm not in the Gang of Eight.

14:22I haven't seen the briefing that people saw. So far you've had people saying, and you know, whether it's Secretary Rubio or other people in Congress who were briefed that there was an imminent threat to the United States to, not just servicemen, but also civilians. It seems to be, this is not necessarily based on the briefing, but things have leaked out is we now know that Israel was planning a preemptive strike because they believed that if they did not, there was going to be a large-scale attack on Israel. And so it becomes one of those things where I don't have enough information to say. I think that probably we'll find out in the long run if this is as justified as it seems to the administration.

Pentagon leadership and pressure

15:10- Who is emerging as influential at the Pentagon? When they call you, you pick up. Is that Pete Hegseth? Is that Steve Feinberg? Is that someone else? If Steve wants to talk to me, I talk with him. If Emil wants to talk with me, I talk with him. If Hegseth calls me, I talk to him. I have actually myself- - Have they all called you? - Let me think about that. I mean, maybe this is too much to talk about publicly, but I don't think they'll mind. I've, of course, met and had meetings with all of them. In terms of an actual phone call from them, I've had calls from Pete. I've had calls from Emil. I have not yet had a call out of the blue from Steve, but, look, these guys, I don't know if I would say

15:54they're, like, emerging as influential so much as they were appointed into these extremely influential roles. And so, of course, of course they're influential. They're the ones who are tasked with making these decisions. From what I understand, they're running this whole organization a little differently than people have run in the past. It's not just me getting the call, I guess would be my point. - Yeah. - I think that they're calling up lots of other people. And by the way, the calls are not necessarily, "Hey, I've got good news for you." There's also a lot of, "Hey, you need to fix your shit on X, Y, and Z. - Like the RTX tweet we saw from the President. I think that that is exactly how this whole department is being run right now.

16:30Like that's the president doing it in public. - By Twitter or by? - That's the president doing it in public. But I think that you have a lot of this pressure from the department as well. They're learning that the best way to fix these problems is to be very, very honest and open about it and not filter it through, you know, let's say, a program review that comes out months later that concludes with like, "Performance unsatisfactory." You want to put pressure on people early enough that they can actually course correct and adapt. And so I very much appreciate all of this. To be honest, even talking with my, I wanna say competitors, but remember we also collaborate with companies like Raytheon and Northrop and Lockheed.

17:08In fact, we're teamed up on certain programs. So I guess my colleagues. In my conversations with my colleagues there, they actually appreciate this as well. They probably don't like being slammed in the press, you know, or on Truth Social, but they do appreciate the early feedback from senior leaders on what they're getting wrong and what they're getting right, because they have the ability to course correct. You mentioned before we started, Gavin Newsom saved Anduril. - Oh, yes, that's right. And I said, "I think he did it without even knowing." This is not to say that Gavin did this, because he wasn't even thinking of Anduril. I suspect he was not at all. But the California state legislature passed a bill

Gavin Newsom's AI bill veto

17:47that was regulating AI. So it made it through the house and it made it through the Senate, not with a super majority. So it was not a bill that could not be vetoed. And one of the provisions in the bill said that it was illegal for companies to build products with AI that cause harm to humans, in fact, that could cause physical harm to humans. This would've been a total prohibition on using artificial intelligence on weapons for the United States military. And I think that this is a terrible thing. Gavin vetoed the bill, and I'm very, very glad that he did. I think, look- - Have you told him this? 0 I have not told him this. If I have the chance, I probably will mention it to him. Look, me and Gavin, we disagree on a lot of things.

18:29There's plenty of things that I could criticize Gavin Newsom on. But I will say, on the balance, he is not one of the crazy people, right? You can disagree with him very easily, but he is not someone who wants to tear down capital markets. He does not want our military to be the weakest military in the world. Like he's generally a sane guy and apparently more sane than most of our legislators who voted for that bill.

Fundraising and Arsenal-1

19:03- What needs to happen before Anduril goes public? Word on the street is that you're raising 4 billion at 60 billion. We reported that the other day. - I can tell you that that's not quite right. But I will tell you also that we are basically continuously raising, talking to investors. As long as there are things that we think we could private capital to work on, building better tools, building better capacity, we're gonna do it. Like our last round, we raised, how much did we raise? It was quite a bit of money. I forget. - It was, yeah, billions. - It was billions of dollars. We put most of that money into building Arsenal-1, which is this 5-million-square-foot production facility to build missiles, fighter jets, air defense systems,

19:43all kinds of things at this huge facility. And if we were raising right now, we'd be putting into basically exactly the same thing. So we need to massively scale up our capability. There's a huge number of things that we're making that are extremely relevant. And I cannot wait for the government to come, give me an order, give me money, then start building the factory, then train the people to build it and then start building. - On Arsenal-1, y'all said the production lines could go hot as soon as this July, a few months from now. - Actually, they're going live in a matter of weeks. We're ahead of schedule. So I just came back from Ohio, we were doing our final site survey. We have our first main building.

20:22We have our first main building done, about a million square feet, and we have the exterior work done on the second building. So that first line is actually gonna be coming online in a matter of weeks. - What's rolling off that line? - We are making a variety of aircraft and missiles and other stuff. - So like Barracuda and Fury? - Barracuda is there, Fury is there. There's another aircraft that we're making there as well for a different. Look, this facility is making things for SOCOM, for the Army, for the Marine Corps, for the Air Force, and one other customer. I mean, like we already have the space all allocated to make all of these things. You know, it's more slanted towards one customer than another

21:06in terms of square footage right now. But yeah, that's coming online in a matter of weeks. And we should be at full scale with that by,

21:18it'll probably be Q2 next year.

21:25who's ahead in the AI race? US, China? - The United States is ahead in the AI race. - How big is the gap? - It's extremely small, because China's been doing a very good job of distilling our models, copying a lot of our technology, leveraging open-source AI advancements and getting those advancements into fielding, not just with the military, but also their police state, their surveillance apparatus much, much faster than the United States has. I'm not saying we need to build a, you know, police state, a surveillance apparatus. I'm just recognizing that China has the will at the top to push these things out much faster than the United States. And you can criticize authoritarian regimes while still recognizing

22:07that certain structural advantages exist, and China is maximizing those structural advantages to push AI into their entire government and its fingers, I think, faster than the United States. Like I would say the Department of War is the furthest along in pushing AI into a lot of these. I mean, like they're using AI right now in this Iran operation to great effect. Try to name another part of government that is leveraging AI that effectively. Yeah, like the Department of War, and I think probably because you have personalities like Emil, you know, in the lead, that's why they're leveraging it so quickly. You know, I'm not putting down Trump's other appointees of the other departments, but you,

22:45in the bureaucracies particularly, you are not seeing Department of Agriculture using AI as effectively as the Department of War. You're certainly not seeing the Department of Education using it as effectively as they could. It's probably like Department of War then maybe Department of Energy are probably the two that I would say are in the lead.

US-China AI race

23:05- You had subterranean on your website. - That's right. - You went a bit viral the other week or month for talking about subterranean capabilities. What are you guys planning? What are up to? - Anduril has working prototypes of subterranean systems that can deliver a variety of kinetic, electronic, and other effects. I've been talking about it louder and louder and louder, because, first, when I started talking about it before we had built anything years ago, everyone thought that I was crazy. And to be clear, the thing people thought was crazy is I said, "I think the next war-fighting domain, is I said, "I think the next war-fighting domain, before it's the moon, is the subterranean domain."

23:35- Is it subterranean, then the moon? - Yeah, subterranean, then the moon. The moon's just gonna take longer to become an actual war-fighting domain. And I'd say it's not a domain when it's like a special weirdo little place where a few people might live. Like it needs to be larger than that. Look, the United States and the Soviet Union both believed during the Cold War that the crust of the earth would turn into a battle space, and that you would move people and machines and effects through fire and logistics chains using the crust of the earth the same way that a submarine moves through the ocean. And I think that the thing that killed that dream isn't that we decided that it was impossible,

24:09it was that we won the Cold War and we turned the spigot off on a lot of very, very interesting things. The difference now is that with the power of autonomy, you can now build these things much more cheaply, much, much, much lower risk. I've been talking louder and louder about this, because when I talk about these things, it acts as a lighthouse that attracts all of the people. They say, "Wait, what's that over there? There's a guy who's doing this." And so I'm talking about it loudly to attract all the right people, the people who wanna work on these problems, the people in government who need to solve these problems. And it's moving along slower than I would like, because it seems so crazy.

24:46It isn't. - Palmer, thanks for the time. - Thank you so much.

24:53- Lightning round? - Let's do it. - Okay. How long does it take to do your hair?

25:00You and me both. (chuckling) - That's it. - You unveiled EagleEye at AUSA in October. Does it have cat ears? - I have seen the rumors, and I have to admit, there may have definitely been some consideration. Internally, we actually call them wolf ears. - Okay. - Last question, might be your favorite, is Yoko Taro the right person to reboot Evangelion? - I have a lot of trust in Hideaki Anno and his judgment when it comes to the franchise. And if he believes it is the right choice, and he is, you know, notoriously protective of that intellectual property. All the licenses of Evangelion have to be personally approved by him. I think that if he is okay with it, then so too must I. - You a NieR fan?

25:45- No, not really.