The US military said late Friday that it had signed on 10 year contract with defense technology startups Anduril. The deal could be worth up to $20 billion.
According to the communicationthe contract starts with a five-year “base period”, with the option to extend the agreement for an additional five years, and includes Anduril hardware, software, infrastructure and services.
The Army describes the deal as a single business contract that consolidates “more than 120 separate procurement actions for Anduril’s commercial solutions.”
“The modern battlefield is increasingly defined by software,” Gabe Chiulli, chief technology officer in the Defense Department’s Office of the Chief Information Officer, said in a statement. “To maintain our edge, we must be able to acquire and deploy software capabilities quickly and efficiently.”
Anduril was founded by Palmer Luckey, who was previously known for selling VR startup Oculus to Facebook (now Meta). Facebook fired Luckey after controversy erupted following a report that he had donated to a pro-Trump political group.
Luckey has repeatedly insisted that the media misunderstood his political views, but according to a recent New York Times articleLuckey and Anduril were embraced by the second Trump administration, thanks to his vision of rebuilding the US military with autonomous fighter jets, drones, submarines and more. The company (named, like Palantir, for a magical object in “Lord of the Rings”) brought in about $2 billion in revenue last year, the NYT says.
Separate reports indicate that Anduril is in talks to raise a new round of funding at a valuation of $60 billion.
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This announcement also comes as the Department of Defense is embroiled in a dispute with Anthropic, with the AI company suing the Department of Defense for labeling it a supply chain threat after a failed contract negotiation, while OpenAI has faced consumer backlash and at least one executive departure after signing its own deal with the Pentagon.
