Oculus Rift founder hints at possible involvement in Ukraine conflict

Palmer Luckey, the founder of the Oculus Rift VR start-up who was pushed out of the company in 2016 when it was acquired by Facebook, is now creating cutting-edge military AI technology with his new company Anduril. In a recent interview, he dropped a hint that Anduril may be involved in the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine in some capacity.

Since founding Anduril, which is now valued at nearly $5 billion, Luckey has won several billion-dollar Pentagon contracts, including one for the development of a counter-drone system based on the company’s ‘battlefield operating system’ Lattice. A demo video shows how the system, which operates autonomously through “computer vision, machine learning and real-time data,” can be used to either electronically interfere with hostile drones or launch its own to physically disable enemy devices.

Luckey spoke to Wired about his relationship with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, and discussed the ethics of AI-assisted defense technology.

Luckey says he met Zelensky shortly after he started Anduril and that the Ukrainian president was one of the first world leaders to take an interest in autonomous military tech.

“He was one of the few leaders on the European continent who understood that you can’t deter expansionist dictatorships using mean words or moving money around, that it could only be deterred through credible threat of force,” Luckey said. “He and a handful of others were seeing the future and realizing that autonomy was going to be an important part of deterring conflict.”

When asked if the preemptive deployment of Anduril technology could have had an impact on the ongoing military conflict in Ukraine, Luckey replied by saying, “There’s a few assumptions in that question, like we aren’t involved.”

He was pressed to confirm his company’s involvement in the conflict, but he stated he could neither confirm nor deny that claim.

“I will say we’ve designed our technology to be specifically relevant to exactly these challenges,” he said. “We’ve seen for years that this shift away from counterinsurgency and back to superpower conflict was going to be what we needed to focus on. We’ve been putting all of our effort into things that are relevant to conflict or to preventing conflict with great powers like Russia and China. The stuff that we are building is directly relevant to the types of engagements that are happening on the ground and in the air in Ukraine.”

Later in the interview, Luckey was asked about his thoughts on the ethics of autonomous weapons and whether or not people should be comfortable with the idea that an AI-based system could pull the trigger.

Luckey responded by saying these types of systems already exist and are actively used on the battlefield, referring to things like close-in weapons systems that protect aircraft carriers from incoming missiles and cruise missiles that can autonomously locate targets based on electronic emissions.

He went on to state that his company’s approach to designing autonomous weapon systems is to make sure they have the ability to be used in accountable ways, but reiterated the importance of allowing these systems to make decisions, like firing on a target, without an active communication link to a human, warning that making such a feature impossible would make these systems very easy to disable.

Luckey, who grew up as a gamer, cosplayer, and VR enthusiast, said he is “less happy” working in the defense industry than he was when developing VR, but that he feels like he is doing something that really matters.