Jan 28, 2025 · 37m · a16z
How AI Is Changing Warfare, with Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf
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In this episode of Revolution by a16z Growth, host David George interviews Brian Schimpf, co-founder and CEO of Anduril Industries, about how AI, autonomous software systems, and commercial tech innovation are transforming defense capabilities. Schimpf details Anduril's mission, the ethics and operational realities of battlefield autonomy, and the urgent need to reform traditional defense acquisition to maintain global deterrence.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. How this is scored →
The host as informed peer 3.8 Guest teaching 3.8 Guest disagreement 0.8 The host pushing back 0.4
speaking balance: gold is the host, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 17:00 Calling out bad business practices
The guest forcefully reframes startup complaints about defense procurement, asserting that being bad at customer understanding and enterprise business is the real reason companies fail.
Hardest push from the host ▶ 18:09 Disentangling acquisition process from strategic choiceThe host refuses a muddy premise and explicitly forces the guest to separate procurement contract structures from the separate question of what assets the military should buy.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 18:24 Explaining cost-plus incentive trapsThe guest educates the host on how legacy WWII cost-plus fixed fee procurement explicitly penalizes speed and efficiency while rewarding cost overruns.
The host holds their own ▶ 34:22 Framing the shift to small form factor defense techThe host shows strong strategic knowledge by arguing that modern commercial tech primitives dictate reallocating capital away from giant platforms like aircraft carriers toward autonomous small form factor equipment.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The host as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The host pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Title Sequence: Revolution by a16z Growth | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 | The host asks standard introductory questions about Anduril's founding and initial product line. The guest provides friendly background context on border surveillance and company history. | |
| AI's Real Impact on Warfare: Solving the Scale Problem | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | The host asks about moving past AI hype into practical defense applications. The guest educates on the core scale problem in military sensing and operational limits. | |
| Autonomy, Data Filtering, and Human Decision-Making | 5 | 3 | 1 | 1 | The host demonstrates AI knowledge by questioning speculative AI alignment/Terminator fears and framing AI as a tool without autonomous objective functions. The guest agrees and expands on human-in-the-loop accountability. | |
| Autonomy as a Deterrent and Life-Saving Tool | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | The host frames the ethical aspect of keeping pilots out of danger using autonomous systems. The guest builds on this concept to discuss deterrence and reducing political friction in defense posture. | |
| Counter-Drone Defense and OpenAI Partnership | 4 | 3 | 0 | 0 | The host draws a smart analogy between defensive drone response decisions and high-stakes autonomous driving edge cases. The guest validates the host's framing. | |
| Breaking Into the Defense Industry as a Startup | 3 | 4 | 2 | 0 | The host asks about market barriers in defense acquisition. The guest offers a slightly blunt reframe, arguing that complaining startups are often just bad at enterprise sales. | |
| Flaws of Defense Acquisition: Cost-Plus vs. Fixed Price | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | The host sharply divides the topic into two distinct questions regarding procurement mechanisms versus strategic asset selection. The guest explains how cost-plus contracts reward inefficiency. | |
| Defense Tech Timelines vs. Technology Evolution Pace | 4 | 5 | 1 | 1 | The host points out the absurdity of 12-year procurement cycles given the rapid pace of tech evolution. The guest details the compounding advantages of rapid iteration seen in competitor testing. | |
| Retooling Industrial Production and Stockpile Vulnerabilities | 3 | 5 | 1 | 0 | The host probes how to build urgency for deterrence. The guest educates on historical industrial retooling timelines and current stockpile vulnerabilities. | |
| Tapping Commercial Supply Chains for Defense Mass | 4 | 4 | 1 | 0 | The guest details creative commercial supply chain integration like using bathtub manufacturing techniques for missile bodies. The host humorously points out the guest's venture capital sounding budget reframe. | |
| Executing a 'Project Warp Speed' for Defense | 4 | 4 | 1 | 1 | The host suggests a 'Project Warp Speed' for defense while noting it must be a permanent institutional shift rather than a temporary fix. The guest outlines bureaucratic reduction strategies. | |
| Shifting to Small Form Factors & Commercial Tech Waves | 6 | 3 | 0 | 0 | The host articulates an expert thesis on shifting capital from traditional massive platforms like aircraft carriers into attritable small form factors. The guest fully endorses the host's logic. |
Statements from this episode (35)
Schimpf: Next 30 years of defense tech relies on cheap autonomous systems
“So number one, the tech for the next 20 or 30 years was going to be like primarily how do you just have more cheap autonomous systems on the battlefield, just more sensors, just more information flowing in.”
Schimpf: Traditional defense industry technology is outdated, slow, and lacks competition
“The tech is old. It is not moving fast. It is very lethargic. There are relatively few competitors at this point.”
Anduril liquid-cooled desktop GPUs for early solar-powered desert Sentry towers
“We were literally taking desktop GPUs GPUs and liquid cooling them to get these things to work in a hot desert under solar power.”
Anduril built Sentry prototype in three months and scaled in 2.5 years
“We were able to go and get a prototype up in about three months and then move into like a pilot in about six months and then a full scale in about two and a half years.”
Schimpf: AI's primary defense role is managing massive sensor scale
“So when I think about, like, where AI is going to drive The most value for warfare. It is dealing with the scale problem, which is really like the amount of information that is the number of sensors, like the sheer volume of systems that are going to be fielde…”
Schimpf: Perfect global battlefield intelligence creates overwhelming information overload
“Now I say I had a perfect AI system that could tell me where every ship, aircraft, and soldier was in the world. What are you gonna do with that? Now I know everything. That is overwhelming.”
Schimpf: Manually piloted military drones cannot scale due to jamming limits
“It's all like manually piloted, but that doesn't really scale. And there presents a lot of limitations on communication, jamming, all these things.”
Schimpf: US defense posture requires human accountability in warfare
“And so the US posture on this is very much, we want to have humans accountable for what happens in war.”
Schimpf: Refusing to apply AI to military decisions is unethical
“Is like, to me, it is unethical to not apply these technologies to these problems.”
Schimpf: Autonomous military tech acts as a stabilizing strategic deterrent
“Has a significant kind of stabilizing impact and a turn impact on It just is harder to use force to get your political ends.”
Schimpf: Ukraine invasion was biggest global wake-up call on bad actors
“Turns out invading Ukraine was probably the single biggest shift I've seen in terms of people recognizing that, look, like, there are still bad actors in the world.”
Schimpf: Military surveillance and strikes will soon achieve high automation levels
“Yeah, I, look, I think the mechanics of, okay, there's this airfield, and you want to go surveil it, and, like, take it you can do some strike, you can do some surveillance, you can do all these things. That, there will be a large degree of automation in that,…”
Palantir streamlined Ukraine military targeting workflows from satellite imagery to approval
“You know, I think a lot of the things that were starting to happen in Ukraine, a lot of the great work Palantir did was on things like this, where it was like the targeting process of going from satellite imagery through to, hey, this looks like a tank, throug…”
Anduril is partnering with OpenAI on counter-drone defense systems
“This is one of the areas we're partnering with OpenAI on”
Schimpf: Sam Altman publicly committed OpenAI to supporting US national defense
“Sam especially has been very clear that he supports our war fighters and he cares about having the best minds in AI working on national security and like who better exists to work through these hard problems.”
Schimpf: Selling to the Pentagon is only 30% harder than commercial sales
“Is it much worse than selling to a bank or an oil and gas company? It's like, I don't know, maybe like, 30% worse, but like, probably not five X worse.”
Schimpf: Anduril doesn't need government procurement reform to succeed
“Do I think it's necessary to change for us to be successful? Not really. Like, we're just going to play the game that they present.”
Schimpf: Cost-plus contracts provide zero incentive to reduce defense costs
“The longer it takes, the less reliable it is, the more complicated it is. It just there's no point of incentive in there to actually drive down costs.”
Schimpf: SpaceX received one-third of Boeing's Starliner funding
“I think SpaceX had a third the amount of money that Boeing was given to make Starliner work.”
Schimpf: Commercial vehicle development takes 2-3 years while military timelines skyrocket
“There's this awesome chart, which shows how long it takes to get commercial aircraft or autos from kickoff to fielding. And it's been flat to slightly better for all of those things, on the order of two to three years. The military aircraft side just went lite…”
Schimpf: Defense prime contractor cartel refuses fixed-price government contracts
“So you have a relatively small cartel of these companies who sort of all say we won't do fixed price programs anymore. They won't do things on a fixed cost basis.”
Schimpf: New defense missiles take 12 years from concept to deployment
“New missile takes about 12 years to go from concept through to fielding, like, 12 years.”
Schimpf: Columbia-class nuclear submarine expected to operate through 2085
“The Columbia class nuclear submarine is going into service in 2035 and its expected lifetime is through 2085.”
Schimpf: China conducts hundreds of hypersonic weapon tests annually versus US's four
“The single best stat for this is they are running hundreds of tests a year of hypersonic weapons. The US is running, like, four.”
Schimpf: Russia retooled defense production and outproduces all of NATO on munitions
“Empirically, Russia, You know, about same duration, about two years to retool their industry against defense production. They are now out producing all of NATO on munitions.”
Schimpf: Wargames show key U.S. munition stockpiles run out in eight days
“You know, one of the areas where we see it is showing up with weapons, so when you look at these wargaming sort of scenarios, and you know, all these wargames are sort of questionable in their own ways but pretty consistently the stockpile of key U.S. Munition…”
Schimpf: Commercial supply chains are the only solution for weapons volume
“And I think on the weapons production side, look, the only solve out of this is to actually tap into the commercial and industrial supply chains that exist.”
Schimpf: Anduril uses bathtub manufacturing techniques for cruise missile fuselages
“And we made the exterior fleet fuselage in this process that you use for making acrylic bathtubs. It's this hot press process.”
Schimpf: Traditional defense weapons face four-year lead times from bespoke components
“Most of these traditional weapons where it's like overly bespoke components, you're like, it's like, we got to get the dude that knows how to solder this one thing out of retirement. Like in the supply chains are super deep. Like four year lead times on these …”
Schimpf: Defense budget allocates under 0.2% to modern autonomous systems
“The amount of money that's actually spent on capabilities like the types of things we're working on is somewhere like between .1 and .2% of the defense budget.”
Schimpf: Pentagon oversight bureaucrats outnumber accountable leaders 10 to 1
“It's just there are 10 times as many people who say no as there are to people who are accountable for doing it.”
Schimpf: Defense Department needs Project Warp Speed for autonomous weapons
“I think there's, I think you have to do both, right? So you've got to say, like, look, like, yeah, we need a warp speed for autonomous systems or weapons. Like, we need that, right? Like, that's a no brainer that we need to have. And in doing that, you can tea…”
Schimpf: Anduril skips proprietary AI model research to leverage commercial models
“We don't do AI model research. We don't need to. We just take the best things that are there.”
Schimpf: Commercial sector drives defense innovation, rendering 10-year roadmaps obsolete
“The innovation Is much more coming from the commercial world. So it becomes being the best adopter. It is no longer these 10 year tech roadmaps the department controls.”
Schimpf: Anduril depended on a strict 2-to-3-year window for success
“I don't think we could have done it five years or later would be too late. Five years earlier probably would have been too early. I think we were in this like two to three year window where we could ride all those waves correctly.”