Anduril CEO Brian Shimp cited ethical concerns surrounding co-founder Palmer Lackey’s close ties to the Trump administration as the defense technology giant competes for lucrative government contracts.
“We’ve done incredibly well under President (Joe) Biden,” he said Thursday on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Streets.” “This has been one of the biggest advances we’ve had as a company. I’m a lifelong Democrat and have great relationships on both sides of the aisle.”
On October 6, just days after Lucky was appointed by a Department of Defense group known as Project Meridian, Anduril announced a shipyard contract worth up to $2.9 billion. The company also won a multi-year Department of Defense contract worth up to $20 billion in March.
The appointment of Mr. Lackey and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to the initiative has raised concerns about whether executives at companies that win billions of dollars in government contracts should play an active role in defense strategy.
“The reality is that (the Department of Defense) just has an incredibly structured process for how they evaluate all these bids,” Schimpf said. “So everything goes through a very competitive process and wins based on merit.”
CNBC reported this week that Musk has donated more than $276 million to Republican organizations since July. Lackey, who helped raise money for President Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign, has donated more than $500,000 to Republican candidates and pro-GOP groups this year, according to a CNBC analysis of FEC filings.
Mr. Anduril this week launched a takeover offer that values the company at $90 billion for employees in 16 countries, five months after the company was valued at more than $60 billion.
Schimpf said this structure allows Anduril to provide liquidity to its employees without being hampered by stock price fluctuations. like human, OpenAI Anduril and Databricks have benefited from abundant private market financing opportunities that allow companies to extend their timelines for going public.
Lackey has said he intends to eventually take the California-based company public. Schimpf told CNBC in July that Anduril was in no rush to launch an IPO, adding that it was a “bad time” to debut during a hype cycle.
“This allows us to stay focused on what we need to do, which is the massive and unprecedented increase in defense production that we need to do over the next few years,” Schimpf told CNBC on Thursday, referring to the employee tender offer.
Anduril was founded in 2017 with the aim of disrupting the traditional defense contractor space. Over the years, the company has built a reputation for autonomous unmanned devices, drone boats, and software that supply the U.S. Department of Defense and allied forces.
The company is also among a growing number of defense startups deploying systems overseas, including in the Middle East, as the U.S. government looks to expand next-generation capabilities.
The use of these new artificial intelligence-powered systems also raises ethical concerns and questions about human intervention. Anthropic’s recent dispute with the Department of Defense arose from disagreements over the use of Anthropic models in military conflicts.
“Fundamentally, when you make important decisions about the use of force or how to use force or the consequences of your actions, it’s fundamentally a human decision,” Schimpf told CNBC.
—CNBC’s Luke Fountain contributed to this article.
