Brian Schimpf
Co-Founder and CEO, Anduril Industries · 1 appearance on the record.
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founderexecutiveengineer@schimpfbrian ↗anduril.com ↗
In 2017, Schimpf co-founded defense technology contractor Anduril Industries, leading the company as CEO to develop autonomous systems and AI-enabled hardware. Before launching Anduril, he spent nearly a decade at Palantir Technologies, where he served as Director of Engineering.
23statements → 8claims → 3claims resolved → 33%fully supported → 4.13/5average certainty → 2.39/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
1 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 4 not checkable as stated how the 8 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
3 predictions · 5 assertions · 3 opinions · 7 insights · 4 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 8 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Brian argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Schimpf: Low-cost drones give adversaries cruise missile equivalents under $100K
“Historically the US has been one of the few countries that has been able to make like cruise missiles, but with the low cost of drones, now effectively Iran and nearly every country has the equivalent of low cost cruise missiles. For, you know, like a 100,000 …”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Brian Schimpf on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Brian Schimpf said on No Priors that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Schimpf: China holds a decisive military advantage with longer-range missiles
“China has been able to modernize and build new technologies and sort of like they're pretty decisive advantage in countering the way that U S fights the longer range of their missiles. Like all of these things are pretty substantial. So there was a degree of l…”
Schimpf: Anduril Builds Weapons and Believes It Is Ethical and Necessary
“We've been clear. We work on weapons. We believe that's important. We believe you can do it ethically. We believe it's necessary. And we're not shy about that.”
Schimpf: US cannot outbuild China on expensive military platforms
“So we're not going to outbuild China. That's not an option. On these large, you know, very expensive platforms. It's just, it's not going to work. It's a bad strategy.”
Schimpf: Autonomous Defense Tech Makes Invading Taiwan Immensely Hard
“It actually really favors the defender. Now, if you can operate in this new way it would be immensely hard for any sort of successful invasion of, you know, Taiwan to actually play out because of You know, what we've learned and what we've seen and how the US …”
Schimpf: US will not adopt autonomous robots making lethal strike decisions
“The U S is not going to adopt systems that have autonomous robots going out and making sort of lethal decisions about, you know, what to attack or not. That's not really how the U S works. We assign accountability to the person that employed a weapon system. T…”
Schimpf: Hypersonic startups operate at 5x pace and fraction of Lockheed's cost
“There are multiple companies doing very credible things on, you know, hypersonic air vehicles, hypersonic rockets and missiles that will be wildly cheaper than the state of the art defense. And it's something that, you know, historically you would have said th…”
Schimpf: Drones and satellites will eliminate need to risk carrier strike groups
“Proliferated satellites and drones you know, an ability to consume mass amounts of information, make sense of the whole battle space, and the ability to engage with targets at outrageously long ranges on a very quick timeline, that fundamentally alters the cha…”
Schimpf: Ukraine would 100% strike deep into Russia if given tools
“You know, you don't want necessarily to give Taiwan the ability to strike deep into mainland China, that Ukrainians would a hundred percent be doing that if we gave them tools to do that into Russia.”
Schimpf: Defense tech requires controlling both hardware and software
“To be really successful in moving The, you know, technology forward, you had to control the hardware and the software to really be able to move the needle. The way defense buys at the end of the day is they want to buy a capability. They want to buy something …”
Schimpf: US produces only 1.7 nuclear submarines annually as workforce retires
“We are producing less nuclear submarines per year, year over year than we have in the past. So we're like, 1.7 per year we can produce these submarines. It's not getting better, and the workforce to make these is retiring.”
Schimpf: Low-cost drones give adversaries cruise missile equivalents under $100K
“Historically the US has been one of the few countries that has been able to make like cruise missiles, but with the low cost of drones, now effectively Iran and nearly every country has the equivalent of low cost cruise missiles. For, you know, like a 100,000 …”
Schimpf: Adversaries deploy new drone technologies in months, not decade cycles
“This was not like 10 year development programs. They're able to turn new drone technologies in months.”
Schimpf: The DoD buys full organizational capabilities, not standalone tech
“What the Department of Defense buys is a capability and a capability to them is not just The hardware and the software that does the thing. It's the support. It's the training. It's the logistics. It's the manufacturing. It's the, you know, it's all the integr…”
Schimpf: Starship will enable mega-constellations for the cost of four satellites
“Just, you know, the dollars to launch, you know, any given amount of satellite with Starship is going to be so cheap. It changes things so fundamentally that, I don't think people have fully realized how monumental a shift that is going to be in terms of the a…”
Schimpf: Few commercial companies pivot as substantially as the DoD has
“They have been operating for, you know, over a century and they have substantially changed the way they operate and organize multiple times over. There are very few commercial companies that can say that is true. Like that is just not actually common. So they …”
Schimpf: Understanding procurement mechanisms is the most critical part of defense tech
“And having folks with the background in the defense space is incredibly important. How you sell, what that looks like, the types of problems they want to work on, how that whole mechanism works is so different than any other, you know, sort of enterprise sales…”
Schimpf: Anduril is developing a 60-foot autonomous submarine
“The largest thing we're working on right now is an autonomous underwater submarine. That's about the size of a school bus. It's about, you know, gonna be 60 feet long, 10 feet diameter. It's a very Big boat. And you know, it'll be able to go huge distances for…”
Schimpf: Anduril does not do AI research, focuses on applying state-of-the-art
“We don't do AI research. We're not interested in any of that. We're looking at how can we kind of best take what is working in the state of the art and apply it rapidly into these defense problem sets.”
Schimpf: Bounding non-deterministic AI is essential for military tech adoption
“A lot of these areas that are more non-deterministic, so, you know, things like reinforcement learning or, you know, potential applications of LOMs into the space, they are inherently non-deterministic, and that is a risk. And so kind of quantifying that, know…”
Schimpf: Defense hardware scaling is difficult due to episodic demand jumps
“The reality with working with a defense customer is you kind of, you know, you have very few buyers, right? It's like, there's not that many customers you're working with. And so you, you're kind of subject to their timing and desire for what they're going to …”
Schimpf: Anduril landed a $1 billion counter-drone contract with SOCOM
“We had landed a counter drone contract with SOCOM for a billion dollars to, you know, kind of scale out and get these technologies deployed.”
Schimpf: Anduril established a Capitol Hill lobbying group on day one
“To convince the government you are a good partner and trustworthy to do this, we've established a lobbying group day one of the company, right? We were on the Hill talking about what we do, why it's beneficial to national security and why it's beneficial to th…”
Schimpf: Military sensing is physically limited to five core sensor types
“There's still physics limits to all of this, and you only have like five types of sensors. You're really only going to be talking about. It turns out, you know, you're going to take a picture of something. It's either going to be thermal or it's going to be, y…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| No Priors Ep. 19 | With Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf | Jun 1, 2023 | 40m |