He made Oculus headsets as a teenager. Now he builds AI weapons for Ukraine: NPR

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Palmer Luckey, 31, founder of Andrell Industries, stands in front of the Dive-LD, an autonomous underwater drone, at the company's headquarters in Costa Mesa, California. Andruil recently won a US Navy contract to build 200 of them annually.

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COSTA MESA, Calif. – Palmer Lucky is easy to find. He is a boy with a mullet and a goatee, almost always dressed in khaki shorts, flip-flops and bright Hawaiian shirts.

When he visits Endorel, an artificial intelligence weapons company founded just south of Los Angeles, he's in his standard business attire.

“This is one of my Dungeons and Dragons Hawaiian shirts,” he explains. “You have a giant dragon. You have a fighter, two wizards. I wear a lot of air shirts because I like them, and I can get away with it.”

He can get away with it because he's been a billionaire since his early 20s.

While still a teenager, Lucky launched his first tech company, Oculus, a virtual reality headset for gaming. He sold it to Facebook a few years later for $2 billion.

Now 31, Lucky took that fortune and founded a new company, Endorel, which is building AI intelligence weapons like drones and submarines.

The Pentagon is buying them, keeping some and sending others to Ukraine. Seven years after its launch, Andorel says it is selling its autonomous weapons to about 10 countries around the world.

In a showroom with its weapons on display, Lucky explained the company's ALTIUS drone.

“It's a drone that fires a tube into the air and then unfolds itself, spreads its wings, spreads its tail, opens the propeller and turns itself into a small airplane,” he said. say “It can carry up to a 30-pound warhead. So you've got a lot of punch in that thing.”

Palmer walks through Lucky Andorel's showroom of artificially intelligent weapons. The company says it can make AI weapons much faster and cheaper than traditional military contractors who build large weapons systems like fighter jets and tanks.

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Andorel has taken a new approach to making weapons.

Andorel is among a growing number of tech companies building artificial intelligence weapons — and boldly proclaiming they will change the way the U.S. and its allies fight wars.

In short, the goal is more tech in combat and less troops in harm's way. The revolution has not yet come. But these companies are shaking up an industry long dominated by giants like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, which make large, conventional weapons, from fighter jets to tanks, designed decades ago. are

Andoril, named after a sword. The Lord of the RingsThere is a very different point of view.

“I was convinced that the big defense companies didn't have the right talent or the right incentive structure to invest in things like artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics,” Lucky says. “And the companies that had the expertise, like Google, Facebook, Apple, were refusing to work with the US national security community.”

Endorel's pitch is AI weapons, developed in less time and at lower cost than traditional defense contractors.

The man who spread the message is a well-known figure in the largely liberal tech community for his outspoken politics, including his work with the military, and longtime support for Donald Trump.

But Palmer Luckey is hard to ignore.

Andoril is helping Ukraine.

Days after Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Lucky made his way to the capital, Kiev, and met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

“Andrell has had the hardware in Ukraine since the second week of the war. So we jumped right in,” Lucky says.

A Ukrainian soldier operates a drone in the Zaporizhzhia region of southeastern Ukraine on June 14. Ukraine is using cheap, civilian drones it buys over the Internet. But Russia has responded with electronic jamming, often rendering such drones useless. Ukraine is now building its own drones and looking for autonomous systems that are difficult to detect and intercept.

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The war in Ukraine has become a laboratory for high-tech systems.

Most impressive is Elon Musk's StarLink satellite network, which provides critical communications for the Ukrainian military.

However, in this emerging industry of AI weapons, critics say there are still many bugs to iron out.

In several off-the-record conversations, people working closely with Ukraine's military say many of the new weapons, from different companies, still have flaws, are vulnerable to Russian countermeasures, and Has not performed as advertised yet.

He further says that so far these weapons have had limited effect and the pace of the war has not changed.

Andorel CEO Brian Schempf acknowledges the challenges, but sees them as surmountable.

Endorel CEO Brian Schumpf stands next to the AA launch system for the Altius drone at the company's headquarters. Schimpf acknowledges that operating in Ukraine is a challenge, but says Anduril's AI weapons are designed to be updated quickly to adapt to changing conditions.

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“Ukraine is a very difficult environment to learn in,” he says. “I've heard different estimates from the Ukrainians themselves that the lifespan of any drone is usually about four weeks. The question is, can you respond and adapt?”

Jacqueline Schneider, who studies military technology as a fellow at the Hoover Institution, says war has dramatically accelerated the pace of innovation.

“Technologies that worked very well a few months ago are now constantly changing,” she says. “And the big difference I see is that the software changes the rate of change.”

Weapons systems in Ukraine need frequent updates, just like software on a phone or computer.

“If you're buying a weapons platform that can't be modified very easily for these software innovations, the weapon system will become obsolete or ineffective in a very short time,” she adds. are

PW Singer, an author who writes about war and technology, says, “This myth of innovation is as if it happened in one place.”

The reality is that “there are a lot of cool, exciting things happening at big defense primes. There are a lot of cool, exciting things happening at big tech Silicon Valley companies. There are a lot of cool, exciting things happening at small startups,” they say.

He also says AI weapons like drones should be seen as an addition to existing weapons — not a replacement.

“No one is saying, 'Well, that means we don't need a conventional military. There's no need for manned aircraft.' Of course, you need both,” he says.

Andorel's Altius 600 drone hangs in the showroom of the company's headquarters in Southern California. Most drones are remotely controlled by a pilot. Endorel drones can be programmed to seek, locate and attack a target without the guidance of a remote pilot before take-off.

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A constantly evolving battlefield

In the wake of a major Russian invasion two years ago, Ukrainians have turned to small, cheap civilian drones made in China and available on the Internet. The Ukrainians attached grenades and other small explosives, then dropped the weapons on the open turrets of the Russian tanks.

In many cases, a $1,000 drone was carrying a multi-million dollar tank or other expensive Russian weaponry while also causing casualties among Russian soldiers. But it is becoming increasingly difficult for Ukrainians to carry out such attacks.

The Russians have responded with electronic jamming, blocking the signal the drone was sending to the Ukrainian soldier operating it. This makes the drone useless.

This is where Anduril is trying to step in. The company's AI drones can be programmed before takeoff to detect Russian tanks or other targets on their own.

Lucky says that once launched, these drones don't need to be guided by a Ukrainian soldier — making them much harder to detect and intercept.

“The independence in the sound is really what sets it apart,” he says. “It's not a remote-controlled aircraft. It has a brain that's capable of finding targets, identifying targets and flying into those targets.”

Of course, this raises the question of who is responsible if something goes wrong – like killing civilians.

In a recent report to the United Nations, Human Rights Watch called for “the urgent negotiation and adoption of a legally binding instrument to prohibit and regulate autonomous weapons systems.”

The organization says more than 270 groups and 70 countries have now joined its campaign to stop killer robots.

However, Endorel's Brian Schumpf says that AI weapons are “not about taking humans out. I don't think that's the right ethical framework. It's really about us making human decision makers theirs. How to make decisions more efficient and more accountable.”

Drones aren't just in the skies anymore. They are also in the oceans.

Ukraine now makes its own maritime drones — essentially jet skis loaded with explosives — that have caused serious damage to the Russian navy in the Black Sea.

Lucky has installed a virtual reality headset at the Indoreel headquarters to show off an augmented reality model of the Indoreal Dive-LD underwater drone.

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Lucky shows me an underwater drone called the Dive-LD, in an old, largely empty industrial building, Andorel's version, that is part of Andorel's otherwise glitzy campus.

We put on virtual reality headsets—an updated model made by Lucky—to enhance the sub.

“It's an autonomous underwater vehicle capable of diving for very, very long distances, to a depth of about 6,000 meters, which is deep enough to go to the bottom of almost any ocean,” he says.

Last month, Andoril won a contract from the US Navy to build more than 200 of them annually.

Lucky has pursued his interests in tech, business and politics since he was a teenager. In 2011, Luckey wrote to Donald Trump urging him to run for president.

“I said, 'Hey, think of me as one of those people who thinks it's good to have a business person in the office, someone who knows how to sign both sides of a check.'”

He still supports Trump.

“Overall, yes, I think he would make a good commander in chief,” he adds.

Yet from a business perspective, he says he's not worried about who wins in November.

“We made a lot of money under Trump. We made even more money under Biden. I think we'll continue to grow whoever is in office next,” Lackey said. Lucky said.

More AI weapons are coming, he says, no matter who's in the White House.

Greg Mayer is NPR's national security correspondent. Follow him @gregmyre1.

NPR producer Kira Walkum contributed to this report.

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