Palmer Luckey made his fortune with VR headsets, founding Oculus as a teen. Now he's focused on the future of warfare, developing autonomous weapons powered by AI for the U.S. military and its allies.

San Francisco

Palmer Luckey, the founder of defense technology company Anduril, has positioned his firm at the forefront of developing autonomous weapons systems powered by artificial intelligence. Anduril's products, including drones, electromagnetic warfare systems, and the Dive XL autonomous submarine, are already in use by the U.S. military and in Ukraine, with Australia investing in the company's submarine technology.

Luckey argues that autonomous weapons can reduce risks to soldiers and provide a technological edge in modern warfare. He acknowledges concerns about AI in lethal systems but emphasizes human oversight and the presence of kill switches. Anduril has disrupted traditional defense procurement by developing products before seeking government contracts, securing billions in deals worldwide. The company recently unveiled its unmanned fighter jet, Fury, marking a significant milestone in its growth.

In Depth: Palmer Luckey on making autonomous weapons for the U.S

Over the last decade, a new breed of tech billionaires has positioned themselves not merely as entrepreneurs, but as visionary saviors who believe technology can transform the world. Tonight, we will introduce you to one of them. His name is Palmer Luckey, and he's the founder of Andril, a California defense products company. Luckey says for too long, the U.S. military has relied on overpriced and outdated technology. He argues a Tesla has better AI than any U.S. aircraft, and a Roomba vacuum has better autonomy than most of the Pentagon's weapons systems. So Andril is making a line of autonomous weapons that operate using artificial intelligence, no human required. Some international groups have called those types of weapons killer robots. But as Sharon Alfonsi first reported earlier this year, Palmer Luckey says it is the future of warfare. The story will continue in a moment. I've always said that we need to transition from being the world police to being the world gun store. Do we want to be the world's gun store? I think so. I think we have to. See, I agree it sounds self-fulfilling, but you have to remember, I also got into this industry because I believe that. Palmer Luckey isn't your typical defense industry executive. His daily uniform, flip-flops and a Hawaiian shirt, is more suited for Margaritaville than the military. But the 32-year-old billionaire is the founder of Andril, whose line of American-made autonomous weapons looks like it came straight out of a sci-fi movie, and whose slick marketing videos wouldn't be out of place in one. There's the Road Runner, a twin turbo jet-powered drone interceptor that can take off, identify and strike. If it doesn't find a target, it can land and try again. Andril also makes headsets, which allow soldiers to see 360 degrees in combat. And there's this. It's an electromagnetic warfare system that can be programmed to jam enemy systems, knocking out drone swarms. It's not some futuristic fantasy. Andril's systems are already being used by the U.S. military and in the war in Ukraine. We shouldn't be sending our people to stand in other countries, putting our men and women, our sons and daughters at risk for the sovereignty of other nations. So you'd rather have an American-made product in their hands than our soldiers over there? Absolutely. Every time. And I think that that's one of the reasons that autonomy is so powerful. Right now, there's so many weapons systems that require manning. If I can have one guy commanding and controlling 100 aircraft, that's a lot easier than having to have a pilot in every single one, and it puts a lot fewer American lives at risk. To be clear, autonomy does not mean remote control. Once an autonomous weapon is programmed and given a task, it can use artificial intelligence for surveillance or to identify, select, and engage targets. No operator needed. It's a scary idea to some people. It's a scary idea, but I mean, that's the world we live in. I'd say it's a lot scarier, for example, to imagine a weapons system that doesn't have any level of intelligence at all. There's no moral high ground in making a landmine that can't tell the difference between a school bus full of children and Russian armor. It's not a question between smart weapons and no weapons. It's a question between smart weapons and dumb weapons. Lucky showed us how those so-called smart weapons can be synchronized on Andril's AI platform. It's called Lattice. Lattice collects data from various sensors and sources, including satellites, drones, radar, and cameras, allowing, he says, the AI to analyze, move assets, and execute missions faster than a human. If you were having to require the human operator to actually map every single action and say, hey, do this, if that, then this, it would take so long to manage it that you would be better off just remotely piloting it. It's the AI on board all these weapons that makes it possible to make it so easy. There are lots of people who go, oh, AI, I don't know, I don't trust it. It's going to go rogue. I would say that it is something to be aware of, but in the grand scheme of things, things to be afraid of, there's things that I'm much more terrified of. And I'm a lot more worried about evil people with mediocre advances in technology than AI deciding that it's going to wipe us all out. Bucky says all Angel's weapons have a kill switch that allow a human operator to intervene if needed. But the Secretary General of the United Nations has called lethal autonomous weapons, quote, politically unacceptable and morally repugnant. When people say to you, look, it's evil, how do you respond to that? I usually don't bother because if I am going to argue with them, I usually poke it. I'm like, OK, so do you think that NATO should be armed with squirt guns or slingshots? How about sternly worded letters? Would you like that? Would you like it if NATO just, they just have a bunch of guys sitting at typewriters, a thousand monkeys writing letters to Vladimir Putin, begging him to not invade Ukraine? Our entire society exists because of a credible backstop of violence threatened by the United States and our allies all over the world. And thank goodness for it. It might sound flip, but part of Palmer Luckey's philosophy is that autonomous weapons ultimately promote peace by scaring adversaries away. My position has been that the United States needs to arm our allies and partners around the world so that they can be prickly porcupines that nobody wants to step on. Nobody wants to bite them. In your mind, is it enough just to have all these things as deterrents or do they have to be deployed and used? They have to believe that you can use them. By the end of this year, Andrews says it will have secured more than $6 billion in government contracts worldwide. When you first came into this space and you're a tech guy in a Hawaiian shirt and you're walking into the Pentagon, maybe in flip flops, I don't know. Were you welcomed with open arms? There were a very small number of people who welcomed me with open arms and everyone else thought that I was nuts. That's because there hasn't been a new company in the defense industry in a significant way since the end of the Cold War. For decades, five defense contractors called the Primes have dominated the industry. Typically, the Primes present an idea to the Pentagon. If the Pentagon buys it, the government pays for the company to develop it, even if it's late or goes over budget. Luckey started NREL to flip that procurement structure on its head. The idea behind NREL was to build, not a defense contractor, but a defense product company. What's the difference? Contractors, in general, are paid to do work, whether or not it succeeds. A product company has a very different mentality. You're putting in your own money. You're putting in your own time. My vision was to build a company that would show up not with a PowerPoint describing how taxpayers are going to pay all my bills, but with a working product where all the risk has been baked out. It will work for enough things that you can save our country hundreds of billions of dollars a year. It may not surprise you that Palmer Luckey's father was a car salesman. His mother took on the role of homeschooling him and his three sisters. Luckey says he was fascinated by electronics and spent a lot of time tinkering in his parents' garage in Long Beach, California. By age 19, his tinkering turned into Oculus, the virtual reality company. And at 21, Palmer Luckey fulfilled every young founder's dream when he sold Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion. The wonder kid graced the covers of magazines, but two years later, he was fired from Facebook. Why did you get fired? Well, you know, everyone's got a different story, but it boils down to I gave $9,000 to a political group that was for Donald Trump and against Hillary Clinton. To be a Trump supporter in 2016, this was at the height of the election insanity and derangement in Silicon Valley. And so I think that a lot of people thought back then that you could just fire a Trump supporter. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has denied that Luckey was fired for his political views. What do you think now when you see those tech leaders, Mark Zuckerberg, lined up behind President Trump now at his inauguration? I am inclined to let every single one of them get away with it. What do you mean get away with it? Coming around to a point of view that is more aligned with the American people broadly, I think is good for the country. I think it is not good for you to have techno corpo elites that are radically out of step with where the American people are. In 2017, Luckey says he left Silicon Valley with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank and a chip on his shoulder. I was fired at the height of my career. My gears were ground and I really wanted to prove that I was somebody, that I was not a one-hit wonder and that I still had it in me to do big things. He says he thought about starting companies to combat obesity or fix the prison system, but ultimately decided to break into the defense industry. Have you run into any people who don't take you seriously because you were never in the military? I don't think so. I think I owe that to the James Bond franchise. Everyone in the military has seen James Bond movies and they all like you, right? I'm the wacky gadget man. I'm the guy who types on the computer and pushes up my glasses and then gives them a strange thing to help them accomplish their mission. And this is his laboratory, Andrew's 640,000 square foot headquarters in Costa Mesa, California. It's a mix of high-tech carpentry and robotic engineering. A sign on the floor pokes fun at the boss's shoe choice. But Lucky wanted to show us something off-campus. We hopped in his 1985 Humvee. The billionaire told us he also owns a decommissioned Black Hawk helicopter, a 48-crew submarine, and a Navy speedboat. In Dana Point, we took a ride 15 minutes off the coast to see the largest weapon in Andrew's arsenal, this submarine. It's called the Dive XL. It's about the size of a school bus and works autonomously. It's not remote controlled by this computer. It's doing it on the brain on the submarine itself. So if I told you to go off and perform some mission that's months long, like go to this target, listen for this particular signature, and if you see this signature run, if you see this one hide, if you see this one follow it, it can do that all on its own without being detected, without communicating with it. Andrew says the Dive XL can travel 1,000 miles fully submerged. Australia has already invested $58 million in the subs to help defend its seas from China. But Andrew's most anticipated weapon was closely guarded until May. Hidden inside this hangar, Andrew's unmanned fighter jet called Fury. There is no cockpit or stick or rudder because there's no pilot. The idea is that you're building a robotic fighter jet that is flying with manned fighters and is doing what you ask it to do, recommending things that be done, taking risks that you don't want human pilots to take. Fury represents a big turning point for the company. Andrew was viewed by some inside the defense industry as a tech bro startup until it beat out several of the prime defense contractors to make an unmanned fighter jet for the Air Force. Fury is scheduled to take its first test flight this summer. If selected by the Pentagon, it, like all Andrew products, will be produced in the U.S. The war games say we're going to run out of munitions in eight days in a fight with China. If we have to fight Iran and China and Russia all at the same time, we are screwed. If we go to war, right? Your version of what Andrew's place is in a conflict, how do you view it? I think what we're going to be doing is first connecting a lot of these systems that otherwise would not have been talking to one another. We're going to be making large numbers of cruise missiles, large numbers of fighter jets, large numbers of surface and subsurface systems. I guess I would hope that Andrew is making most of the stuff that's being used on day nine, day 10, day 11, day 100. I think a lot of that is going to be coming out of our factories after everything else is run dry. A closer look at the Fury unmanned fighter jet. It's an entirely new way of fighting. At 60MinutesOvertime.com.

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