Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf addressed ethics questions over co-founder Palmer Luckey‘s close ties to the Trump administration as the defense tech giant competes for lucrative government contracts.
“We’ve done incredibly well under [President Joe] Biden,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” on Thursday. “That was one of the biggest ramps that we’ve had as a company. I’m a lifelong Dem and have great relationships on both sides of the aisle of this.”
On Oct. 6, Anduril announced an up to $2.9 billion shipyard contract a few days after Luckey was named to a Department of Defense group known as Project Meridian. The company also won a multi-year DOD contract worth up to $20 billion in March.
The appointments of both Luckey and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk to the initiative have raised concerns over whether executives whose companies get billions in government contracts should play an active role in defense strategy.
“The reality is that the [Department of Defense] has just an incredibly structured process for how they evaluate all these incoming bids,” Schimpf said. “So everything goes through these very competitive processes, and we win based on the merits.”
Musk has contributed more than $276 million to Republican groups since July, CNBC reported this week. Luckey, who helped raise money for President Donald Trump‘s 2020 campaign, has donated more than $500,000 to Republican candidates and GOP-aligned groups this year, according to a CNBC analysis of FEC filings.
This week, Anduril opened a tender offer to employees in 16 countries that would value the company at $90 billion, five months after it topped a $60 billion valuation.
Schimpf said the setup allows Anduril to give liquidity to employees without the distraction of stock price fluctuations. Like Anthropic, OpenAI and Databricks, Anduril has benefitted from an abundance of private market funding opportunities that have allowed businesses to extend the timeline to any public offering.
Luckey has voiced his intentions to eventually take the California-based company public. Schimpf told CNBC in July that Anduril isn’t rushing into an IPO, adding that “a bad time” to debut is during a hype cycle.
“This allows us to stay really focused on what we need to do – which is a massive, unprecedented ramp in defense production that we need to execute on over the next couple of years,” Schimpf told CNBC on Thursday, referring to the employee tender offer.
Anduril was founded in 2017 to disrupt the traditional defense contractor space. Over the years, the company gained a reputation for its autonomous unmanned devices, drone boats and software it supplies to the U.S. Department of Defense and allied militaries.
The company is also among a growing number of defense startups deploying their systems overseas, including the Middle East, as the U.S. government seeks to expand next-gen capabilities.
The use of these new artificial intelligence-equipped systems has also drawn ethics concerns and questions about human intervention. Anthropic’s recent spat with the Pentagon stemmed from a disagreement over the use of its models in military conflict.
“Fundamentally, anytime you are making critical decisions about use of force or how to employ these, or what the consequences are of your actions, that is fundamentally a human decision,” Schimpf told CNBC.
—CNBC’s Luke Fountain contributed to this article.
