Silicon Valley banks on the military market

While much has been made of tech’s unwillingness to work with the Pentagon, start-ups are still plumbing the industry’s decades-long ties to the military. Over the rolling, scrub-spotted hills of the Southern California coast, where defense contractors once tested rockets and lasers for President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program, what looked like a big, mechanical insect stalked a white pickup truck.

Half a mile away, 28-year-old Palmer Luckey, one of the tech industry’s proudest iconoclasts, talked excitedly about the military potential of the flying machine — a self-piloting drone, called Ghost, that his start-up company Anduril built.

“You can just set it up and then go do something else while it manoeuvres,” he said. Though parts of Silicon Valley have kept the Pentagon at arm’s length in recent years, Luckey’s company, based 400 miles to the south in Irvine, is aggressively courting business from government agencies and the military.

It is one of a number of young tech companies, many of them far from Silicon Valley, that are shrugging off the concerns about the potential militarisation of their creations that in recent years have stirred employee revolts at industry giants like Google and Microsoft. Recently, Luckey, dressed as if ready for the beach in a Hawaiian-like shirt, shorts and flip-flops, joined other Anduril employees at the company’s testing site near Camp Pendleton, a Marine training facility.

As the drone took off and swooped between the hills, Luckey said it could track an object and capture detailed images from seven football fields away. Using many of the artificial intelligence technologies that underpin self-driving cars, Anduril’s drones can identify and track vehicles, people and other objects largely on their own. The drones are not armed, but could be useful for guarding bases or reconnaissance. The same sensor technologies that allow the drones to fly on their own could also be used to identify targets on a battlefield. Luckey, who sold his previous company, the virtual-reality start-up Oculus, to Facebook for $2 billion, shrugged off the question of whether tech companies should willingly work with the military and intelligence communities.

“Most engineers want to engineer. They want to get stuff done,” the outspoken entrepreneur said as artillery fire echoed from a nearby range. “Most people have a pretty practical view.”

The military and intelligence communities have a long history with research labs and tech companies in Silicon Valley. ARPANET, the forerunner of the internet, was funded by the Defense Department. David Packard, one of the founders of Hewlett-Packard, served as deputy secretary of defense under President Richard Nixon. Oracle, one of the biggest software companies, got its start writing computer code for the CIA.

But the idea of autonomous weapons has been controversial in Silicon Valley, and in recent years some in the tech industry have developed a new distrust of government work.

That distrust swelled in 2013 when the former defense contractor Edward J. Snowden leaked documents that revealed the breadth of spying on Americans by intelligence services, including monitoring the users of large internet companies. In 2018, Google pulled out of a Defense Department effort to develop artificial intelligence technology after sustained protests from company workers. Parts of the Valley firmly draw the line at weaponisation of their creations. Mike Volpi, a partner with the venture capital firm Index Ventures, said that Anduril’s drone technology impressed him but that his firm would not invest in any company whose technology could be used with weapons.

“There are many ways to make money,” Volpi said. “If a company has a stated strategy to hurt people, we would not invest.” But a growing array of venture capital firms see things differently. Anduril is backed by several notable ones, including Founders Fund, created by the PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel; Andreessen Horowitz; and General Catalyst. “We have the greatest technologists in the world in Silicon Valley,” said Katherine Boyle, a General Catalyst partner. “We really need to have Silicon Valley working with Washington.”