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00:00It was a couple of weeks ago, actually, that we spoke to you on the show in San Francisco.
00:05And at that point, it was the early days of the war in Iran.
00:08We were trying to make sense of the strategy from the U.S. side, the use of drone technology,
00:14the use of different ballistic missiles.
00:18I think probably the best place to start is an update, I guess, from Andaril's side.
00:22There aren't any specific reports of where Andaril's technology has or hasn't been used.
00:27But you do have anti-drone technology, for example, in deployment at U.S. facilities in the Gulf.
00:34That's part of what we'll be talking about here today at Hill Valley.
00:37Yeah, it is true.
00:39I mean, we have a lot of kit deployed in the region.
00:41We've been actively engaged in the conflict.
00:45Not a whole lot of details I can provide outside of that, of course.
00:48But I think there is a big story that has emerged around the asymmetry in drone warfare that's taking place
00:54with Iran,
00:55where they're lobbying drones that cost tens of thousands of dollars,
00:59and we're countering them with capabilities that are upwards of several millions of dollars per shot.
01:04So one of the goals that Andaril has had since the very beginning when we started the company in 2017
01:09is to significantly lower the cost of engagement.
01:12Right.
01:12And that's using low-cost munitions, using low-cost interceptors.
01:16And that is much of what we have deployed in the region today.
01:19I find this point fascinating.
01:20We were talking about JDAMs and the LUCA system, the kind of equivalent of what Iran was using.
01:27But with time, having some distance from Iran, literally distance, you know, longer-range ballistic missiles,
01:34will be a part of the story.
01:36What have you learned about the battlefield present day, and where is software coming into it?
01:41Because actually that's a big part of what Andaril is working on, too.
01:44Yeah.
01:44I mean, you think about the software layer as the command and control for, you know, doing air combat, essentially.
01:51And the historic way of doing this in, you know, a Cold War era conflict is you have dozens of
01:56assets in an airspace.
01:58You know, you might have fighter planes, you might have bombers.
02:00These are very expensive assets.
02:01And so shooting a $2.25 million Patriot missile at a MiG-29, that's a pretty good trade.
02:06But in modern combat, we're seeing hundreds of assets in an airspace.
02:11Low-cost drones, low-cost cruise missiles, rockets, you know, with a more ballistic trajectory,
02:16which is a lot of what Hezbollah has been launching into Iran for decades at this point.
02:20And you have to figure out a way to counter all those systems in a cost-effective way by threat.
02:26So you have to be able to do that analysis to say, is this a thing that we can take
02:29out with a ballistic trajectory rocket?
02:32Is this something that we have to take out with a Patriot?
02:34Is this something we can take out with electronic warfare?
02:36And sorting all of that is, at the end of the day, it's an AI problem.
02:40And so, you know, Andaril has this AI operating system backend that we call Lattice that's used in all of
02:46these environments
02:47to not only detect and identify and track those assets, but also go through the kill chain analysis
02:53and figure out how we can combat these threats in the most cost-effective way possible.
02:57AI and warfare is something that's being stress-tested right now in deployment, but also from an ethical perspective.
03:04You just made a speech here at the Hill and Valley Forum, and you talked about philosopher kings,
03:09the worry that founders such as yourself start getting involved in the ethical decision-making of the Pentagon.
03:15We, of course, are today expecting a courtroom and administrative perspective
03:21of what's happening between Anthropic and the Pentagon.
03:24So it feels as though you think Anthropic's gone too far.
03:28Well, you know, I think that I believe in democracy, and, you know, I don't want me or Palmer or
03:35Brian or Matt,
03:36any of my co-founders, making decisions about U.S. policy as it pertains to the use of our capabilities.
03:41At the end of the day, we are selling to the United States people, not just, you know, the Department
03:46of War.
03:47And those people have elected representatives that are making decisions about how these things are used.
03:52Now, the DOW is way far ahead, actually, of really even our adversaries in determining how AI is going to
03:59impact
03:59or autonomy is going to impact the future of warfare.
04:01DoD 3000.09 is, like, one of the policy directives that governs things like CWIS,
04:08the Close-In Weapons Support System, which is already deployed.
04:11It's a fully autonomous counter-air system that's deployed on naval vessels.
04:15So we've been thinking about this for a long time.
04:18Obviously, what I was kind of calling out this morning at the Hill and Valley Forum
04:22is that I think that the government, Congress, the executive branch,
04:27really needs to create clearer guidelines that they can communicate to the commercial industry.
04:31Right. Your point was this is an issue of a lack of clarity in policy.
04:35Absolutely, yeah.
04:36There's, you know, there's almost like a reticence to engage at the policy level
04:40on these really important questions because, you know, it's like an abdication of duty.
04:44It's like, well, you know, we haven't really been super clear.
04:46We, it's very easy for us to blame the technology industry when they show up with different ideas.
04:52But I actually think it's incumbent upon our government to clearly, you know,
04:57define and think about how technology is going to change the way that we engage in warfare.
05:02We engage in taxing our population, the way that we engage in rooting out fraud, waste.
05:08All of this is, these are technology questions, but they're policy problems.
05:12And that means that we need to have policy guidance that informs it.
05:15Is it incumbent on the government or on founders such as yourselves?
05:20You have to say you sound a pretty statesman-like out there, Trey.
05:23Is it up to you or the government to start winning the battle for the hearts and minds of people
05:27right now
05:28when it comes to AI? At the moment, it is doomer after doomer, negativity after negativity,
05:32because we've lost the ability to storytell on what's positive about AI.
05:36Well, I would give a lot of credit, actually, to the director of OSTP, Michael Kratios.
05:40I think he's done an incredible job, actually, laying out what he thinks the strategy should look like.
05:46But he has to put that in the hands of Congress, right?
05:48And so he's given his guidelines.
05:51Congress is in a position now where they need to respond to those
05:53and see if they can come up with policies that are good for the American people.
05:57But I don't think that the administration is sitting idly by not taking action on this.
06:01I think Michael and his team have done a great job.
06:03Because if it was codified, I think the point you're making on stage is that if it was more codified,
06:08then people's red lines would be benchmarked against the rules.
06:11Yeah, there's this false narrative that exists that tech companies don't want regulation.
06:16I think we don't want excessive regulation, but some regulation is good
06:20because it provides us with the guardrails that we know if we build within these constraints,
06:24there is an incentive structure that we can be rewarded for.
06:28Let me ask you this.
06:29Founders Fund did, separate from your role, Andrew, Founders Fund is an investor in Anthropic.
06:34Did the firm make any intervention or support of Dario Amadei in that decision-making of the last two weeks?
06:42Well, you know, the actual history behind why we're called Founders Fund is that we believe in being founder-friendly.
06:49And, you know, we've never fired a founder.
06:51We've never voted against a founder in a board governance position either.
06:55And this is, it was very unique when we started this 20 years ago.
06:59It's becoming more popularized today.
07:01But what that means in practice is that we're not trying to run these people's companies.
07:06Dario runs his own company.
07:08He's the founder and CEO of Anthropic.
07:10I have engaged in conversations with both him and the department, of course,
07:14but I don't see it as the role of the financial investor in a company
07:19to try to impact the way that the company is approaching things
07:21or even try to convince their would-be customers to approach them in any particular way either.
07:26Ohio.
07:27Ohio.
07:27In January of 2025, you invited me to Ohio, and I went and Palmer promised
07:32that by the end of 2026, that place would be up and running and producing.
07:37Yeah.
07:38And it is.
07:39As of yesterday, we are fully up and operational now in Arsenal 1,
07:43the first 800,000 square feet of manufacturing in our Columbus facility.
07:49We'll be producing, you know, a run rate of around 120 to 150 aircraft,
07:55Fury, a collaborative combat aircraft.
07:57Can you contextualize that a bit?
07:58Yeah.
07:58So, basically, building fireplanes is really hard.
08:01We build an autonomous fireplane called Fury.
08:03And so we have 800,000 square feet that is being spun up right now to start manufacturing these fighterplanes.
08:11And we'll be at a rate of over 100 aircraft moving forward.
08:15That ain't cheap, Trey.
08:17It's not cheap.
08:18And you're quite good at raising funds.
08:20And what we understand is that with Android, we're, what, raising about $4 billion and a $61 billion valuation.
08:26Is that where we are?
08:27And how close are we to the finish line?
08:30Well, we're in a really lucky position in that we don't, it's not a fundraise necessarily.
08:34It's more of, like, figuring out allocations.
08:37And I'm in the middle of that right now.
08:39And so I would hate to, on live television, make any commitments around a timeline knowing that I'm going to
08:44get about 100 emails as I walk out of this.
08:46So I'll leave it at that.
08:48You've got the problem of inbound and demand, therefore, shall we say, Trey.
08:51But there is a lot of people, dare I take it back to the Middle East, and this is humanity,
08:56a human issue.
08:58But it's also a money issue.
09:00And people are looking at the Middle East and wondering, are we still going to get the support for our
09:04startups?
09:05Are we going to still get that funding that we become used to, the deep pools of capital?
09:10Are they going to have to be siphoning off money to the very much here and now of rebuilding their
09:15countries?
09:15How do you think about that as you look at that dynamic?
09:19Well, I think the Middle Eastern sovereign funds have done an incredible job of being committed to the future of
09:26their countries outside of the confines of energy,
09:30which has been obviously the primary driver for growth for them for a long time.
09:34So do I think that KSA or the UAE or Qatar are going to walk away from being financial investors
09:41in that future?
09:42No, I don't think that's probable at all.
09:44They have very deep pockets.
09:46They have teams that are incredibly engaged.
09:48Now, what that does mean, I think, is that those financial investors will become much more interested in being financially
09:54involved in things like rebuilding,
09:57which will many times involve U.S. companies, whether that's AI companies, defense companies, infrastructure.
10:03There's a lot of layers there that they'll be playing into.
10:05The reporting overnight was some of the Gulf nations either becoming more deeply involved in the war in Iran or
10:12having a viewpoint that it continues.
10:15The Hill and Valley Forum is about, in simple terms, the relationship between the technology sector, Silicon Valley, and the
10:22different arms of government.
10:23And Anderil is a great case study for how that's going.
10:26How's that going?
10:28Well, you know, I always tell people when they come and pitch defense tech companies that your product is important,
10:34but it's not sufficient.
10:36Necessary, but not sufficient.
10:38You really have to know how to work the government side of the equation.
10:42Procurement has been broken for a really, really long time.
10:45You know, you could build a perpetual motion machine and pitch it to the Department of Defense historically, and they
10:50would say, wow, that's cool that you built a perpetual motion machine.
10:52We're going to give a trillion dollars to Lockheed Martin to try to build the perpetual motion machine that you
10:57already built.
10:58Luckily, I think we're moving away from that.
11:00This administration is not the first.
11:03You know, going back to even Ash Carter's days during the Obama administration, there was a renewed focus on innovation
11:08with the Third Offset Initiative, the Defense Innovation Board, the Defense Digital Service.
11:12So the cultural shift has been happening for over a decade now.
11:16And this administration has really doubled down on the idea that we need new entrants.
11:21We need a new arsenal of democracy, a new arsenal of freedom.
11:25And they're streamlining a lot of the processes that have gummed things up in the past.
11:30I think Secretary Hegseth is very committed to this.
11:32Undersecretary Mike Duffy, who runs acquisitions and sustainment.
11:36And Undersecretary Emil Michael, who, you know, before being, you know, working in research and engineering in the Department of
11:41War, was famously the COO of Uber.
11:43So if we don't talk about hill and valley intersections, maybe nothing better, no better example than Undersecretary Michael.
11:50And there is just a wall of opportunity in terms of the amount of founders that are coming.
11:57We just had a story out today.
11:58Kleiner Pernikin is raising money, $3.5 billion.
12:01And they're saying they've never seen this quality and quantity of founders.
12:04A lot of them are ex-Palantir, as you were, and you've borne out Anderil.
12:09What isn't being fixed yet by the founder community?
12:11What do you want to see, say, with your founders fund hat on?
12:14You know, one of the things Peter Thiel once told me is that whenever someone asks you what you're excited
12:19about, it's them saying, I'm really confused.
12:22I'm not excited about anything.
12:23So I hope that's not what you're saying, Caroline.
12:25I'm excited about it all.
12:26I'm excited about a lot of things.
12:28Yeah, I think that, you know, a lot of the themes that we're seeing that have emerged in the Hill
12:32and Valley Forum are about re-industrialization.
12:34Yeah.
12:35And so while AI is really exciting, I don't disagree with that.
12:38I think it will change things about our labor force.
12:41It will change things about the way that we do, you know, a lot of critical, solve a lot of
12:44critical problems as a nation.
12:46We also, you know, sent away a lot of the industrial capacity that we have built over many, many decades
12:52in the last 30 years.
12:55And there needs to be a rebuilding that happens there.
12:57And there are some categories that I would say are maybe more critical than others when you think about critical
13:02supply chain as a big one.
13:04Semiconductors is a big one.
13:07You know, these are industries that the startup community can't do alone.
13:11The capital investment that would be required is truly enormous.
13:14Well, like the $5 trillion that Elon Musk might need for his tariff fund.
13:17Yes, yes, exactly.
13:19As one example.
13:21But I think that this is like an area where the government can work more closely with Silicon Valley to
13:26say, hey, we need to take some bets.
13:28And if you go back to that Obama era, there was the investment in Solyndra that was this kind of
13:33famous explosion that led to the government taking a step away from being more involved in those sort of infrastructure
13:40bets.
13:41I think we need to get back to being willing to take bets as a nation in order to rebuild
13:45our industrial capacity.
13:47And if we don't do that, I think we're in a really, really bad spot.
13:50So, you know, that will be a big focus of not only Founders Fund, but I'm also hoping the American
13:54government, given that I think it's super important.
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