Anduril founder Palmer Luckey wants to arm the U.S.’s allies. Could his insistence on deferring to Washington scare them off?

Palmer Luckey is clear when asked whether he would sell weapons to North Korea. “If the U.S. asks me to, yes.”

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Anduril, the defense-technology startup Luckey founded in 2017 after his politically charged departure from Facebook, could be set for a $60 billion valuation. The company is riding a record surge in global defense spending and a shift in Silicon Valley sentiment toward working with the military, selling autonomous systems such as its Fury drone and Ghost Shark submarine to U.S. partners including Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan.

War in the Middle East—between high-tech planes on the side of the U.S. and Israel, and relatively low-tech drones and missiles on the side of Iran—is also revealing how current-day warfare is changing, and how manufacturing capacity can quickly become stretched.

But as Anduril grows into one of America’s most closely watched weapons makers, Luckey’s position—that arms makers should function as extensions of U.S. government policy—puts him at the center of overlapping debates about alliance politics in Asia, the rise of Chinese military hardware, and how much power tech billionaires should wield over questions of war and peace.

“I’m never going to promise to do something the U.S. wouldn’t do,” he told Fortune in early February, on the sidelines of the Singapore Airshow. The question is: Will other governments be relieved–or unnerved–by that pledge?

From consumer tech to defense tech

Drones were all over the Singapore Airshow, held at Singapore’s Changi Exhibition Centre on a sweltering February day. Exhibitors hawked unmanned aerial vehicles and systems to manage them; a few booths further down, other companies sold systems to shoot those same drones down.

One such drone was the YFQ-44 Fury: a grey metal fuselage that resembles a fighter jet stripped of its cockpit. Made by Anduril Industries, the Fury is a jet-powered, unmanned combat aircraft designed to team with fighters like the F-35 and carry out high-risk air-to-air missions autonomously at a fraction of the cost of a traditional jet.

Anduril is the work of Palmer Luckey, who founded the defense tech startup in 2017 after leaving Facebook amid political fallout over his support for a pro-Trump, anti-Hillary Clinton group during the 2016 election.

“It’s funny seeing people say, ‘Look at him—he’s wasting his time,’ or, ‘He’s evil and trying to make war happen,’” Luckey said. “Post-Ukraine, I feel like people have been more like, ‘Okay, maybe he wasn’t totally nuts.’ Even the people who hate me agree I’m not nuts.”

Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Oculus VR Inc., left, plays the new video game “Eagle Flight VR” during an Ubisoft news conference before the start of the E3 Gaming Conference on June 13, 2016 in Los Angeles, California. Kevork Djansezian—Getty Images

Luckey, 33, was in consumer tech long before he went into defense. He started Oculus VR, a company that designed virtual reality headsets, in 2012, which was later bought by Facebook for $2 billion.

Months after leaving Facebook in 2017, Luckey founded Anduril Industries—named for Aragorn’s reforged sword in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings—alongside several other executives from Palantir Technologies. Last year, Anduril raised $2.5 billion in a funding round led by Founders Fund, the Peter Thiel-led VC fund, which valued the defense tech company at $30.5 billion. The company is currently in talks with Thrive Capital and other investors for a new funding round that could double its valuation to $60 billion, Bloomberg reported on March 3.

Luckey admits that moving from VR headsets to defense was a shift. “With VR, the only thing stopping us from launching a new headset was whether it was finished and ready to launch. You can’t do that with the military. You’re moving at someone else’s pace.”

That sluggishness is partly why Anduril doesn’t rely on defense grants to develop products, instead relying on its own funds. “Cost-plus contracting has perverse incentives: people make more money when programs are slow, more money when things are more expensive, more money when things break all the time. If I relied on the government to give me money to start development, I’d have to wait years just to even start.”

Not all of Anduril’s customers praise the company’s work. The Wall Street Journal reported last year that some Ukrainian operators stopped using Anduril’s drones in 2024, following frustrations with their performance. U.S. testers, too, have reportedly criticized the responsiveness of Anduril’s Lattice operating system.

Anduril has pushed back against these reports, arguing in an extended response that failures are part of a broader strategy of “highly iterative model of technology development—moving fast, testing constantly, failing often, refining our work, and doing it all over again.”

“It is not surprising that Anduril, as a leading new defense technology company, is subject to increasing scrutiny,” the company