< This U.S. company is helping arm Ukraine against Russia — with AI drones

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

This week, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is making the rounds at the 75th annual NATO summit in Washington. He is telling everyone he can that Ukraine needs more weapons to defend itself from Russia.

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PRESIDENT VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY: How much longer can Putin last? The answer to this question is right here in Washington - your leadership, your actions, your choice - the choice to act now.

SUMMERS: The West has been sending weapons to Ukraine since the start of the war with mixed results. Some weapons were outdated and ineffective. Others proved extremely potent, at least until the Russians developed countermeasures, like drones.

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SUMMERS: Initially, Ukraine largely came up with its own solution - buying cheap Chinese drones available on the internet. They proved successful until Russia responded with electronic warfare, which allows them to jam signals and make these drones useless.

These kinds of moves and countermoves always happen in wars, which become testing grounds for all sorts of technology. This has been especially true in Ukraine, where both sides have advanced weapons. Many U.S. weapons companies have gone to Ukraine in hopes of showing what their systems can do as they focus on new technology like artificial intelligence.

PALMER LUCKEY: It's a drone that fires out of a tube into the air and then unfolds itself - extends its wings, extends its tail, unfolds the propeller - and kind of transforms itself into a small airplane. We have versions of it that can carry up to a 30-pound warhead. So you've got a lot of punch in this thing.

SUMMERS: That's Palmer Luckey, the founder of a U.S. defense tech company called Anduril. The company says it sells autonomous weapons to around 10 countries worldwide, and it's been helping arm Ukraine since the early days of the war. CONSIDER THIS - Ukraine needs more weapons and better weapons to stand up to Russia. Could AI weapons made by a billionaire tech entrepreneur's company hold the answer?

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SUMMERS: From NPR, I'm Juana Summers.

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SUMMERS: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. When he was still a teenager, Palmer Luckey launched his first tech company. That was Oculus, the virtual-reality headset for gaming. Soon after, he sold it to Facebook for $2 billion. Now 31, Luckey has a new company called Anduril that's making artificial intelligence weapons. The Pentagon is buying them, keeping some for itself and sending others to Ukraine. NPR's Greg Myre has the story from Costa Mesa, Calif.

GREG MYRE, BYLINE: It's easy to find Palmer Luckey. He's the guy with the mullet, wearing shorts, flip-flops and a bright Hawaiian shirt. As he shows me models of Anduril's artificial intelligence weapons at its gleaming headquarters just south of Los Angeles, he's in standard business attire.

LUCKEY: This is one of my Dungeons & Dragons Hawaiian shirts. So, you know, you've got an elder dragon. You've got a fighter, a couple wizards. So I wear a lot of Hawaiian shirts because I like them, and I can get away with it.

MYRE: More to the point, he also describes an Altius drone we're looking at, which Anduril provides to both the Pentagon and Ukraine.

LUCKEY: It's a drone that fires out of a tube into the air and then unfolds itself - extends its wings, extends its tail, unfolds the propeller - and kind of transforms itself into a small airplane. We have versions of it that can carry up to a 30-pound warhead. So you've got a lot of punch in this thing.

MYRE: Anduril is among a growing number of tech companies making AI weapons and boldly proclaiming they'll change the way the U.S. and its allies fight wars. They're shaking up an industry long dominated by giants such as Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, which build large, traditional weapons, from fighter jets to tanks. Anduril, named after a sword in "Lord Of The Rings," has taken a very different approach in its seven-year history.

LUCKEY: I had this belief that the major defense companies in the U.S. didn't have the right talent or the right incentive structure to invest in things like artificial intelligence, autonomy, robotics. And the companies that did have expertise in those things - like Google, like Facebook, like Apple - were refusing to work with the U.S. national security community.

MYRE: Anduril's pitch is AI weapons built in less time and at a lower cost than traditional contractors. The man spreading the message is an iconoclastic figure in the largely liberal tech community for his work with the military and his outspoken politics, including long-standing support for Donald Trump. But Palmer Luckey is hard to ignore. Just days after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Luckey made his way to Kyiv for talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

LUCKEY: Anduril has had hardware in Ukraine since the second week of the war. So we immediately got involved.

MYRE: The war is a laboratory for high tech. Most notable is the Elon Musk Starlink satellite network, which provides critical communications for Ukraine's military. However, in this emerging industry of AI weapons, skeptics say a lot of bugs still need to be worked out. In several off-the-record conversations, people working closely with Ukraine's military say many new weapons from a range of companies still have flaws, that they're vulnerable to Russian countermeasures and simply haven't performed as advertised. So far, these weapons have had a limited impact and have not changed the war's trajectory. Here's how Anduril's CEO, Brian Schimpf, responds.

BRIAN SCHIMPF: Ukraine is a very challenging environment to learn in. And, you know, I've heard various estimates from, you know, the Ukrainians themselves that any given drone that they find to work typically has a life span of about four weeks. Question is, can you respond and adapt?

MYRE: Jacquelyn Schneider studies military technology at the Hoover Institution.

JACQUELYN SCHNEIDER: Technologies that worked really well even a few months ago are now constantly having to change. And this - the big difference I do see is that software changes the rate of change.

MYRE: Just like the software on your phone or computer, weapon systems in Ukraine need to be updated frequently. P. W. Singer is an author who writes about war and tech.

P W SINGER: There's this mythology of innovation as if it happens in one place.

MYRE: The reality is...

SINGER: There's a lot of cool, exciting stuff happening in the big defense primes. There's a lot of cool, exciting stuff happening in the big tech Silicon Valley companies. There's a lot of cool, exciting stuff happening in these small startups.

MYRE: Two years ago, Ukrainians turned to small, cheap civilian drones made in China and available on the internet. The Ukrainians then attached grenades, then dropped them down the open turrets of unsuspecting Russian tanks. The Russians responded with electronic jamming, blocking the signal between the drone and the Ukrainian soldier operating it. This renders the drone useless.

This is where Anduril believes it can make a difference. Its AI drones can be programmed before takeoff to search on their own for a Russian tank. Once launched, these drones don't need guidance from a Ukrainian soldier, making them very hard to stop. Again, Palmer Luckey.

LUCKEY: The autonomy on board is really what sets it apart. It's not a remote-controlled plane. There's a lattice brain on it that is able to look for the target, identify targets and fly into those targets, even if they're jamming you.

MYRE: Of course, this raises questions about who's responsible if something goes wrong, like hitting civilians. In a recent report to the United Nations, Human Rights Watch called for, quote, "the urgent negotiation and adoption of a legally binding instrument to prohibit and regulate autonomous weapons systems." But Anduril's Brian Schimpf looks at AI weapons this way.

SCHIMPF: This is not about taking humans out of the loop. I don't think that's the right ethical framework. This is really about, how do we make human decision-makers more effective and more accountable to their decisions?

MYRE: Drones aren't just in the skies anymore. They're also in the seas. Ukraine makes its own sea drones - think jet skis packed with explosives. They've inflicted serious damage on the Russian Navy in the Black Sea.

Palmer Luckey shows me Anduril's version - an underwater drone called Dive-LD - in an old, mostly vacant industrial building that's part of Anduril's otherwise shiny, new campus. We put on virtual-reality headsets - an updated model of the one Luckey created - for an augmented look at the sub.

LUCKEY: It's a autonomous underwater vehicle that is able to go very, very long distances, dive to a depth of about 6,000 meters, which is deep enough to go to the bottom of almost any ocean anywhere in the world.

MYRE: Last month, Anduril won a U.S. Navy contract to build 200 annually. Luckey has pursued his interests in tech, business and politics since his teen years. Way back in 2011, he wrote to Donald Trump and urged him to run for president.

LUCKEY: And I said, hey, consider me one of the people who thinks it'd be good to have a business person in office, somebody who's familiar with signing both sides of a check.

MYRE: He still supports Trump today.

LUCKEY: In general, yeah, I think he'd make a good commander in chief.

MYRE: Yet, from a business perspective, Palmer Luckey says he's not that concerned about who wins in November.

LUCKEY: We made a lot of money under Trump. We made even more money under Biden. I think we're going to continue expanding whoever is in office next.

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

Greg Myre, NPR News, Costa Mesa, Calif.

SUMMERS: This episode was produced by Kathryn Fink and Jonaki Mehta. It was edited by Courtney Dorning and Andrew Sussman. Our executive producer is Sami Yenigun.

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SUMMERS: It's CONSIDER THIS FROM NPR. I'm Juana Summers.

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