Who is this 32-year-old tech billionaire developing AI weapons designed to turn the U.S. into the world’s ‘gun store’?

On a podcast in February, Palmer Luckey confidently asserted a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory about the very origin of conspiracy theories.He told host Shawn Ryan, a former Navy Seal and CIA contractor, that “the term conspiracy theory itself and conspiracy theorist was invented by the CIA and used and pushed through their media plants to discredit anybody who questioned the results of the original JFK investigation,” adding, “It's pretty extraordinary that 'conspiracy theory,' 'conspiracy theorists' are themselves literally terms born of a government conspiracy.”That claim has been a staple of dorm rooms and internet forums for decades, even though it’s provably false. The CIA was created in 1947. By then, English speakers around the world had been using the term for roughly a century.Perhaps it’s unsurprising in 2025 to hear yet another tech bro on yet another podcast present fallacy as fact. But some might see Luckey—who later in the episode falsely suggested that “extremists” planted a pipe bomb found outside Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters on Jan. 6, 2021—as biting the hand that feeds him when he casts United States government agencies in a nefarious light.In March, his company, California-based Anduril Industries, landed hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with the Department of Defense (DoD). Those were added to contracts the company already holds with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The U.S. government has made Anduril a defense tech “unicorn.” It’s already won over a billion dollars in government contracts. The startup’s notional valuation is now at 11 figures.And those are just its domestic contracts.While Trump's disruption of long-term U.S. alliances might stymie Anduril’s international sales in the short term, the company inked a contract with the United Kingdom last month to supply drones to Ukraine. And its subsidiary, Anduril Australia, is manufacturing "Ghost Sharks," aka autonomous submarines, for that country's navy. Beyond this, after millions in lobbying, much of it passed through an internal lobbying shop, the company has arguably succeeded in recasting crucial elements of U.S. military doctrine so that it now envisages AI as the central command and control technology of future battlefields. In doing so, Luckey and Anduril are quietly helping to consummate a dream of the “tech right”: That they will be the primary armorer of the U.S., and then the world, even as the place of a post-Trump U.S. in global affairs becomes more mercenary.As Luckey summarized his broader view for a Wall Street Journal podcast in March, “The United States should not be the world police. We should be the world gun store.”It might give some pause to think of a Trump-supporting, 32-year-old tech bro who created a virtual reality gaming headset bringing this dream to life. Yet few who might object to his vision, or the billions his company stands to make in realizing it, have taken note of Anduril’s and Luckey’s progress.Into the ThielversePalmer Luckey wears his pro-Trump, hard right politics on his Aloha-printed sleeve. On Ryan’s show he called himself “pro-natalist,” echoing the enthusiasm of the likes of Elon Musk, saying, “If you don't have 2.1 kids minimum, you're a traitor to the nation and our ideals.” On his unfounded beliefs that the DNC pipe bomb may have been staged, he remarked, “I'm really stoked that we got Trump in office and that we have people coming to the FBI who are going to be able to dig into this.”The Daily Dot emailed Luckey for comment on this reporting, but received no response. On a Wall Street Journal podcast, asked what he last texted with DOGE supremo Musk about, he detailed a bizarre bugbear he shares with the world's richest man: “The fact that the Black Eyed Peas' Grammy-winning song, ‘Let's Get Retarded,’ has been taken off every single music platform and replaced with the child-safe version that was for children's sports games, ‘Let's Get It Started.’”He called the band releasing a clean version of the song two decades ago, when he was middle school age, “an example of memory holing that nobody even really talks about, despite everyone agreeing that it has happened.” The saga is thoroughly described on the song’s Wikipedia page.“We use our own money to design and build products for the United States military and allies around the world that leverage autonomy and artificial intelligence to do things that nobody's been ever able to do with weapon systems before," Palmer Luckey said.Luckey also has a family connection to the MAGAverse. His sister, Ginger Luckey, is married to Matt Gaetz, who resigned ahead of the release of a House Ethics Committee report into allegations of criminal behavior including trafficking of minors. Gaetz denies wrongdoing. That report found that, while he had violated various laws, he hadn’t trafficked minors across state lines. Nevertheless, it was enough to tank his nomination as Trump's Attorney General.Luckey's politics have not always worked for him in Silicon Valley.In March 2017, less than three years after his virtual reality headset startup Oculus was acquired by Facebook in a deal that also brought Luckey to work for the company in Menlo Park, he left amid controversy over his financial support for a pro-Trump billboard campaign.Luckey and Facebook executives have publicly differed over whether Luckey was fired over his politics; Luckey’s lawyers negotiated a $100 million payout from Facebook in 2018, partly on the basis that he had been pressured internally to voice support for 2016 Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson over Trump. Luckey founded Anduril weeks after exiting Facebook. From the start the company bore the imprimatur of Peter Thiel and his own defense and security venture, Palantir.The young billionaire has become entangled in the Thielverse.His Anduril co-founders are former Palantir executives Matt Grimm, Trae Stephens, and Brian Schimpf.Thiel’s Founders Fund was the lead investor in Anduril’s first two funding rounds in 2017 and 2018, and its most recent Series F round that raised $1.5 billion at a valuation of $14 billion. Anduril’s very name conforms with the Tolkien-derived themes of Thielverse. Palantir is named for a seeing stone in Tolkien’s universe, befitting its emphasis on surveillance; Thiel-backed Vice President JD Vance venture partnership Narya Capital was named after the foremost ring of power; Anduril is a sword alternately known as the Flame of the West.The company is also the clearest answer to Thiel’s long-simmering ambition—some might say demand—that U.S. defense contracting make room for the disruptive, software-defined solutions of Silicon Valley.A rising star in defense contractingBy Luckey’s own account, Anduril’s secret sauce is routing around the defense establishment’s protracted procurement processes to deliver products that harness AI on the battlefield. As he told Shawn Ryan, “We use our own money to design and build products for the United States military and allies around the world that leverage autonomy and artificial intelligence to do things that nobody's been ever able to do with weapon systems before.” “Our business model is that we build these things using our own money, not taxpayer money, and then we show up to the government, not with a PowerPoint saying, ‘Hey, here's this thing I want you to give me the money to build from scratch,’” he added.Arguably, though, their biggest win to date has been in successfully competing in the defense procurement process against established players. Their prototype was selected as one of two to go forward in the Air Force’s search for an autonomous combat aircraft to fly support missions.Every big Anduril contract has involved embedding autonomous hardware in an AI driven system that, in theory, harmonizes battlefield systems with human operators. Just weeks ago, Anduril landed a 10-year, $642 million contract to provide an AI-driven counter-unmanned aerial system (CUAS) for defending Marine Corps bases. This came on top of a $249 million contract with the Marines for squad-level drones to be launched in the field.According to Anduril, the base defense system provides for a round-the-clock response to unmanned attacks using their autonomous Ghost aircraft with command, control, and communication handled by their Lattice mesh networking system."If you die in the game, you die in real life," Luckey wrote of the deadly VR headset he created, adding that he hadn't had "the balls to actually use it."Lattice is the glue for all of Anduril’s major systems; the company describes it as taking “data from disparate and distributed sensors, feeds, and systems ... into a single integration layer,” where “AI, machine learning, and sensor/data processing techniques are used to filter high-value information to users."Anduril’s autonomous Sentry towers are also embedded in Lattice networks. This combination won them a $350 million contract with DHS in 2022 to place Sentry towers on the U.S.-Mexico border.(Whatever Luckey’s political predilections, the Biden years were good for his company. In 2021, it presented its Sentry towers as an answer to Biden’s call for “high tech capacity” in border security.)According to the company, by September 2024, some 300 of these towers had been installed and now provide “approximately 30% coverage of the U.S. southern land border.”Its own best advocateThese and other government contracts have been accompanied by a growing lobbying effort.According to disclosures, last year Anduril spent $2.5 million with several firms. The lion’s share, nearly $2 million, went to their internal lobbying shop.These efforts may be reflected in the posture of new Trump DoD appointees on force modernization.In February, newly appointed Army Secretary Dan Driscoll wrote in a message to personnel that he would seek to “reinvigorate our industrial base and revolutionize our procurement processes.”As foreign policy think tank the Quincy Institute pointed out, “[D]efense tech executives, like Anduril’s own Christian Brose and Palmer Luckey, have repeatedly made similar arguments in pushes for military contracts.”In December, Brose, Anduril’s chief strategy officer, told the Republican-hatched Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party that U.S. security depends on producing “orders of magnitude more weapons and military platforms” than geopolitical rivals like China.Then, in March, Trump appointed Michael Obadal, a senior director at Anduril, as Driscoll’s No. 2, putting an Anduril ally in the driver’s seat as the Army considers upping its investment in frontier technologies.Where’s the scrutiny?Amid a decade of political turmoil, Anduril’s rise in defense tech has so far provoked little public response or opposition, despite pushback on AI in defense inspired by the shocking employment of AI targeting by Israeli forces in Gaza, the controversial history of closely aligned Palantir, and Luckey’s brash persona. (Anduril did not provide Israel with the AI it used to target Gazans, but Israel's deployment of it has inspired concerns over the ethics of using AI in defense.)Until now the company and its AI drones have managed to fly under the radar. That may be changing, at least on the margins.Anduril has made use of a niche software technology in rolling out its embedded systems. Nix is at once a functional programming language, the basis both for a system for creating reproducible software builds and a Linux-based operating system, and a cutting-edge open-source software project with a passionately dedicated community. Last April, Nix’s founder, Eelco Dolstra, stepped down from the NixOS Foundation board after a community revolt occasioned in part by Dolstra’s purportedly persistent attempts to grant Anduril’s wish to become a sponsor of NixCon, the Nix community’s annual conference. Internal critics claimed that Dolstra and another former board member, Graham Christensen, had a conflict of interest because their company, Determinate Systems, had a business relationship with Anduril.When Christensen was asked on X to clarify Determinate Systems’ relationship with Anduril, he replied, “Did you know this category of question is pretty much impossible to answer because [nondisclosure agreements] are a thing?”Elsewhere, Anduril’s plans for an enormous plant to handle new orders has led to protests.In February, Ohio approved $70 million in state subsidies for the construction of Anduril’s planned 5 million square foot Arsenal 1 factory near Columbus, with the new venture being welcomed as a job creator by Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine (R).Not everyone is sold on the plant and the vague accounts of what it will actually make.Amid local skepticism about the bang that Ohioans might get for their buck, Veterans for Peace staged an on-site protest.Darrin Broering is an organizer with Veterans for Peace Chapter 183, located in Columbus, and was a key organizer of the February protest against the new plant. Ahead of the event, he told the Daily Dot that he was "disappointed" with Luckey's transition from Oculus—"this really cool, new technology, used different types of experiences"—to weapons. He said of Anduril's military technology that, despite any jobs it might bring, "The moral question needs to be asked, and I don't think people are asking that yet. They say it's for security or defense, but they're not thinking about who's on the other side of the barrel."The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here to get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.Sign up to receive the Daily Dot’s Internet Insider newsletter for urgent news from the frontline of online.The post Who is this 32-year-old tech billionaire developing AI weapons designed to turn the U.S. into the world’s ‘gun store’? appeared first on The Daily Dot.

On a podcast in February, Palmer Luckey confidently asserted a thoroughly debunked conspiracy theory about the very origin of conspiracy theories.He told host Shawn Ryan, a former Navy Seal and CIA contractor, that “the term conspiracy theory itself and conspiracy theorist was invented by the CIA and used and pushed through their media plants to discredit anybody who questioned the results of the original JFK investigation,” adding, “It's pretty extraordinary that 'conspiracy theory,' 'conspiracy theorists' are themselves literally terms born of a government conspiracy.”That claim has been a staple of dorm rooms and internet forums for decades, even though it’s provably false.

The CIA was created in 1947. By then, English speakers around the world had been using the term for roughly a century.Perhaps it’s unsurprising in 2025 to hear yet another tech bro on yet another podcast present fallacy as fact.

But some might see Luckey—who later in the episode falsely suggested that “extremists” planted a pipe bomb found outside Democratic National Committee (DNC) headquarters on Jan. 6, 2021—as biting the hand that feeds him when he casts United States government agencies in a nefarious light.In March, his company, California-based Anduril Industries, landed hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts with the Department of Defense (DoD).

Those were added to contracts the company already holds with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). The U.S.

government has made Anduril a defense tech “unicorn.” It’s already won over a billion dollars in government contracts. The startup’s notional valuation is now at 11 figures.

And those are just its domestic contracts.While Trump's disruption of long-term U.S.

alliances might stymie Anduril’s international sales in the short term, the company inked a contract with the United Kingdom last month to supply drones to Ukraine. And its subsidiary, Anduril Australia, is manufacturing "Ghost Sharks," aka autonomous submarines, for that country's navy. Beyond this, after millions in lobbying, much of it passed through an internal lobbying shop, the company has arguably succeeded in recasting crucial elements of U.

S. military doctrine so that it now envisages AI as the central command and control technology of future battlefields. In doing so, Luckey and Anduril are quietly helping to consummate a dream of the “tech right”: That they will be the primary armorer of the U.

S., and then the world, even as the place of a post-Trump U.S.

in global affairs becomes more mercenary.As Luckey summarized his broader view for a Wall Street Journal podcast in March, “The United States should not be the world police. We should be the world gun store.

”It might give some pause to think of a Trump-supporting, 32-year-old tech bro who created a virtual reality gaming headset bringing this dream to life. Yet few who might object to his vision, or the billions his company stands to make in realizing it, have taken note of Anduril’s and Luckey’s progress.Into the ThielversePalmer Luckey wears his pro-Trump, hard right politics on his Aloha-printed sleeve.

On Ryan’s show he called himself “pro-natalist,” echoing the enthusiasm of the likes of Elon Musk, saying, “If you don't have 2.1 kids minimum, you're a traitor to the nation and our ideals.” On his unfounded beliefs that the DNC pipe bomb may have been staged, he remarked, “I'm really stoked that we got Trump in office and that we have people coming to the FBI who are going to be able to dig into this.

”The Daily Dot emailed Luckey for comment on this reporting, but received no response. On a Wall Street Journal podcast, asked what he last texted with DOGE supremo Musk about, he detailed a bizarre bugbear he shares with the world's richest man: “The fact that the Black Eyed Peas' Grammy-winning song, ‘Let's Get Retarded,’ has been taken off every single music platform and replaced with the child-safe version that was for children's sports games, ‘Let's Get It Started.’”He called the band releasing a clean version of the song two decades ago, when he was middle school age, “an example of memory holing that nobody even really talks about, despite everyone agreeing that it has happened.

” The saga is thoroughly described on the song’s Wikipedia page.“We use our own money to design and build products for the United States military and allies around the world that leverage autonomy and artificial intelligence to do things that nobody's been ever able to do with weapon systems before," Palmer Luckey said.Luckey also has a family connection to the MAGAverse.

His sister, Ginger Luckey, is married to Matt Gaetz, who resigned ahead of the release of a House Ethics Committee report into allegations of criminal behavior including trafficking of minors. Gaetz denies wrongdoing. That report found that, while he had violated various laws, he hadn’t trafficked minors across state lines.

Nevertheless, it was enough to tank his nomination as Trump's Attorney General.Luckey's politics have not always worked for him in Silicon Valley.In March 2017, less than three years after his virtual reality headset startup Oculus was acquired by Facebook in a deal that also brought Luckey to work for the company in Menlo Park, he left amid controversy over his financial support for a pro-Trump billboard campaign.

Luckey and Facebook executives have publicly differed over whether Luckey was fired over his politics; Luckey’s lawyers negotiated a $100 million payout from Facebook in 2018, partly on the basis that he had been pressured internally to voice support for 2016 Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson over Trump. Luckey founded Anduril weeks after exiting Facebook. From the start the company bore the imprimatur of Peter Thiel and his own defense and security venture, Palantir.

The young billionaire has become entangled in the Thielverse.His Anduril co-founders are former Palantir executives Matt Grimm, Trae Stephens, and Brian Schimpf.Thiel’s Founders Fund was the lead investor in Anduril’s first two funding rounds in 2017 and 2018, and its most recent Series F round that raised $1.

5 billion at a valuation of $14 billion. Anduril’s very name conforms with the Tolkien-derived themes of Thielverse. Palantir is named for a seeing stone in Tolkien’s universe, befitting its emphasis on surveillance; Thiel-backed Vice President JD Vance venture partnership Narya Capital was named after the foremost ring of power; Anduril is a sword alternately known as the Flame of the West.

The company is also the clearest answer to Thiel’s long-simmering ambition—some might say demand—that U.S. defense contracting make room for the disruptive, software-defined solutions of Silicon Valley.

A rising star in defense contractingBy Luckey’s own account, Anduril’s secret sauce is routing around the defense establishment’s protracted procurement processes to deliver products that harness AI on the battlefield. As he told Shawn Ryan, “We use our own money to design and build products for the United States military and allies around the world that leverage autonomy and artificial intelligence to do things that nobody's been ever able to do with weapon systems before.” “Our business model is that we build these things using our own money, not taxpayer money, and then we show up to the government, not with a PowerPoint saying, ‘Hey, here's this thing I want you to give me the money to build from scratch,’” he added.

Arguably, though, their biggest win to date has been in successfully competing in the defense procurement process against established players. Their prototype was selected as one of two to go forward in the Air Force’s search for an autonomous combat aircraft to fly support missions.Every big Anduril contract has involved embedding autonomous hardware in an AI driven system that, in theory, harmonizes battlefield systems with human operators.

Just weeks ago, Anduril landed a 10-year, $642 million contract to provide an AI-driven counter-unmanned aerial system (CUAS) for defending Marine Corps bases. This came on top of a $249 million contract with the Marines for squad-level drones to be launched in the field.According to Anduril, the base defense system provides for a round-the-clock response to unmanned attacks using their autonomous Ghost aircraft with command, control, and communication handled by their Lattice mesh networking system.

"If you die in the game, you die in real life," Luckey wrote of the deadly VR headset he created, adding that he hadn't had "the balls to actually use it."Lattice is the glue for all of Anduril’s major systems; the company describes it as taking “data from disparate and distributed sensors, feeds, and systems ..

. into a single integration layer,” where “AI, machine learning, and sensor/data processing techniques are used to filter high-value information to users."Anduril’s autonomous Sentry towers are also embedded in Lattice networks.

This combination won them a $350 million contract with DHS in 2022 to place Sentry towers on the U.S.-Mexico border.

(Whatever Luckey’s political predilections, the Biden years were good for his company. In 2021, it presented its Sentry towers as an answer to Biden’s call for “high tech capacity” in border security.)According to the company, by September 2024, some 300 of these towers had been installed and now provide “approximately 30% coverage of the U.

S. southern land border.”Its own best advocateThese and other government contracts have been accompanied by a growing lobbying effort.

According to disclosures, last year Anduril spent $2.5 million with several firms. The lion’s share, nearly $2 million, went to their internal lobbying shop.

These efforts may be reflected in the posture of new Trump DoD appointees on force modernization.In February, newly appointed Army Secretary Dan Driscoll wrote in a message to personnel that he would seek to “reinvigorate our industrial base and revolutionize our procurement processes.”As foreign policy think tank the Quincy Institute pointed out, “[D]efense tech executives, like Anduril’s own Christian Brose and Palmer Luckey, have repeatedly made similar arguments in pushes for military contracts.

”In December, Brose, Anduril’s chief strategy officer, told the Republican-hatched Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party that U.S. security depends on producing “orders of magnitude more weapons and military platforms” than geopolitical rivals like China.

Then, in March, Trump appointed Michael Obadal, a senior director at Anduril, as Driscoll’s No. 2, putting an Anduril ally in the driver’s seat as the Army considers upping its investment in frontier technologies.Where’s the scrutiny?Amid a decade of political turmoil, Anduril’s rise in defense tech has so far provoked little public response or opposition, despite pushback on AI in defense inspired by the shocking employment of AI targeting by Israeli forces in Gaza, the controversial history of closely aligned Palantir, and Luckey’s brash persona.

(Anduril did not provide Israel with the AI it used to target Gazans, but Israel's deployment of it has inspired concerns over the ethics of using AI in defense.)Until now the company and its AI drones have managed to fly under the radar. That may be changing, at least on the margins.

Anduril has made use of a niche software technology in rolling out its embedded systems. Nix is at once a functional programming language, the basis both for a system for creating reproducible software builds and a Linux-based operating system, and a cutting-edge open-source software project with a passionately dedicated community. Last April, Nix’s founder, Eelco Dolstra, stepped down from the NixOS Foundation board after a community revolt occasioned in part by Dolstra’s purportedly persistent attempts to grant Anduril’s wish to become a sponsor of NixCon, the Nix community’s annual conference.

Internal critics claimed that Dolstra and another former board member, Graham Christensen, had a conflict of interest because their company, Determinate Systems, had a business relationship with Anduril.When Christensen was asked on X to clarify Determinate Systems’ relationship with Anduril, he replied, “Did you know this category of question is pretty much impossible to answer because [nondisclosure agreements] are a thing?”Elsewhere, Anduril’s plans for an enormous plant to handle new orders has led to protests.In February, Ohio approved $70 million in state subsidies for the construction of Anduril’s planned 5 million square foot Arsenal 1 factory near Columbus, with the new venture being welcomed as a job creator by Ohio Gov.

Mike DeWine (R).Not everyone is sold on the plant and the vague accounts of what it will actually make.Amid local skepticism about the bang that Ohioans might get for their buck, Veterans for Peace staged an on-site protest.

Darrin Broering is an organizer with Veterans for Peace Chapter 183, located in Columbus, and was a key organizer of the February protest against the new plant. Ahead of the event, he told the Daily Dot that he was "disappointed" with Luckey's transition from Oculus—"this really cool, new technology, used different types of experiences"—to weapons. He said of Anduril's military technology that, despite any jobs it might bring, "The moral question needs to be asked, and I don't think people are asking that yet.

They say it's for security or defense, but they're not thinking about who's on the other side of the barrel."The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here to get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.

Sign up to receive the Daily Dot’s Internet Insider newsletter for urgent news from the frontline of online.The post Who is this 32-year-old tech billionaire developing AI weapons designed to turn the U.S.

into the world’s ‘gun store’? appeared first on The Daily Dot..