The American entrepreneur Palmer Luckey has played a major part in many major names in the tech industry, including founding Oculus VR, but has risen to prominence for his stewardship of Anduril Industries in 2017 – which puts artificial intelligence (AI) at the heart of its operations and capabilities.
“If you’re talking about killing people, you need to be minimizing the amount of collateral damage … So, to me, there’s no moral high ground in using inferior technology, even if it allows you to say things like, ‘We never let a robot decide who lives and who dies’.”
The question of AI ethics
Luckey has long been a proponent of the use of AI in defense, with the Anduril founder even naming his company as such because it shares the acronym.
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Speaking with Fox News Sunday in December 2025, he outlined a philosophy that it’s much safer, in ways, to incorporate the best possible technologies into military capabilities than it is to ignore emerging innovation, whether AI or quantum, and be left with ‘lesser’ tech.
For Luckey, there’s seemingly no point in taking the moral high ground when talking about matters of life and death – when the very nature of the business is morally called into question to begin with.
The future of military technology
Luckey’s statement challenges the common orthodoxy that humans must always be in the loop over high-stakes decision-making, especially with matters of life and death. And, for that reason, it’s highly controversial.
The direction of travel is not, however, up for debate, with plenty of examples of AI becoming increasingly prominent in international conflicts.
Ukrainian officials, for example, recently revealed that in 2024, the nation’s military used drones to kill Russian soldiers – marking the earliest reported example of the autonomous killing of humans.
Without doubt, it won’t have been the last such incident, and points to a future in which those engaged in conflict are likely to use every tool at their disposal to achieve their military aims, regardless of the moral implications.
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