Anduril Industries

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed by President Trump on July 4, 2025, includes provisions that effectively grant Anduril Industries a monopoly on new autonomous surveillance towers for US Customs and Border Protection across both southern and northern borders. CBP confirmed to The Intercept that Anduril is now the country's only approved border tower vendor. Anduril's ASTs cover an estimated 30% of the US southern land border, using AI and computer vision to detect, identify, classify, and track people crossing the border. Civil liberties groups have raised concerns about the humanitarian impact of automated border surveillance.

In early 2025, Anduril Industries took over the US Army's Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program from Microsoft, a contract worth up to $22 billion to deliver approximately 120,000 augmented reality headsets to soldiers. The Army approved a legal action in April 2025 that effectively transferred Microsoft's contract to Anduril. This represents one of the largest military technology contracts in history and a major expansion of Anduril's defense portfolio into wearable military technology.

In January 2025, Anduril announced Arsenal-1, a 5-million-square-foot hyperscale manufacturing facility near Columbus, Ohio, with approximately $900 million allocated for construction. Palmer Luckey described it as designed to build autonomous fighter jets, missiles, torpedoes, and other weapon systems faster than near-peer American geopolitical rivals. The facility represents a significant expansion of autonomous weapons manufacturing capacity, built in partnership with Ohio State University.

In December 2024, Anduril announced a partnership with OpenAI to develop military artificial intelligence systems for the US Pentagon, focused on defending against weaponized drone attacks. OpenAI will provide GPT-4o and o1 models integrated with Anduril's Lattice defense software platform. The partnership raised ethical concerns among OpenAI employees about AI technology being applied to military use. This marked a significant step in the militarization of frontier AI models.

Since at least 2022, the UK Home Office has employed Anduril's Maritime Sentry Towers to detect and help intercept refugees crossing the English Channel in small boats. The towers scan for vessels at a range of over 20km from shore. Privacy International highlighted this as a case of dual-use military surveillance technology being applied to immigration enforcement, raising concerns about the use of military-grade AI surveillance against vulnerable populations seeking asylum.