On an airstrip somewhere in Texas, a swarm of killer jets approaches--controlled by, of all things, a large language model. At a secret US military base located about 50 miles from the Mexican border--exact location: classified--the defense contractor Anduril is testing a remarkable new use for a large language model. I attended one of the first demonstrations last year. From a sun-bleached landing strip, I watched as four jet aircraft, codenamed Mustang, appeared on the horizon to the west and soared over a desolate landscape of boulders and brush. The prototypes, miniaturized for the demo, fell into formation, their engines buzzing as they grew near.

Late this spring, I was led into a car in Kyiv, blindfolded, and driven to a secret factory in western Ukraine. The facility belongs to TAF Drones, founded three years ago by Oleksandr Yakovenko, a young Ukrainian businessman who wanted to help fend off the Russian invasion. When the war started, Yakovenko was busy running a logistics company in Odesa, but his country needed all the help it could get. Ukraine was overmatched--fighting a larger, wealthier adversary with a bigger army and more sophisticated weapons. "The government said to me, 'We need you to make drones,' " Yakovenko told me.

It is a significant overhaul of a department that in 40 years has never before been placed so squarely on the chopping block. Here's how today's defense tech companies, which have fostered close connections to the Trump administration, stand to gain, and why safety testing might suffer as a result. The Operational Test and Evaluation office is "the last gate before a technology gets to the field," says Missy Cummings, a former fighter pilot for the US Navy who is now a professor of engineering and computer science at George Mason University. Though the military can do small experiments with new systems without running it by the office, it has to test anything that gets fielded at scale. "In a bipartisan way--up until now--everybody has seen it's working to help reduce waste, fraud, and abuse," she says.

Microsoft's six-year-old program to make HoloLens headsets for the US Army could be getting some extra help. If the Department of Defense approves the deal, the company will expand its existing partnership with Anduril Industries, Palmer Luckey's defense startup, for the next stages of the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) program. Microsoft, which spearheaded the program, would transition into supplying AI and cloud infrastructure. Meanwhile, Anduril would do pretty much everything else, including "oversight of production, future development of hardware and software and delivery timelines." Anduril makes a wide array of defense tech, including drone interceptors, sentry towers, comms jammers, drones and even an autonomous submarine. But given Luckey's background as the primary inventor of the Oculus Rift -- and, by extension, the modern consumer XR industry -- the IVAS program could perhaps be the defense tech startup's most natural fit.

More than ever, we feel a duty and desire to extend empathy to our nonhuman neighbors. In the last three years, more than 30 countries have formally recognized other animals--including gorillas, lobsters, crows, and octopuses--as sentient beings. A trio of books from Ed Yong, Jackie Higgins, and Philip Ball detail creatures' rich inner worlds and capture what has led to these developments: a booming field of experimental research challenging the long-standing view that animals are neither conscious nor cognitively complex. It seems we have two types of laugh: one caused by tickling, and the other by everything else. Ukrainian artist Oleg Dron specializes in expansive, haunting landscapes.

I was here to examine the pitch being made by Anduril, other companies in defense tech, and growing numbers of people within the Pentagon itself: A future "great power" conflict--military jargon for a global war involving competition between multiple countries--will not be won by the entity with the most advanced drones or firepower, or even the cheapest firepower. It will be won by whoever can sort through and share information the fastest. And that will have to be done "at the edge" where threats arise, not necessarily at a command post in Washington. "You're going to need to really empower lower levels to make decisions, to understand what's going on, and to fight," Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf says. "That is a different paradigm than today." To show how the new tech will fix that, Anduril walked me through an exercise demonstrating how its system would take down an incoming drone threatening a base of the US military or its allies (the scenario at the center of Anduril's new partnership with OpenAI).

OpenAI has partnered with defense startup Anduril Industries to develop AI for the Pentagon. The companies said on Wednesday that they'll combine OpenAI's models, including GPT-4o and OpenAI o1, with Anduril's systems and software to improve the US military's defenses against unpiloted aerial attacks. The deal comes less than a year after OpenAI softened its stance on using its models for military purposes. Although the ChatGPT maker's policies still prohibit its models from developing or using weapons, it deleted a line in January that explicitly banned integrating its tech into "military and warfare" use. The company said at the time it was already working with DARPA on cybersecurity tools.

OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT and one of the most prominent artificial intelligence companies in the world, said today that it has entered a partnership with Anduril, a defense startup that makes missiles, drones, and software for the United States military. It marks the latest in a series of similar announcements made recently by major tech companies in Silicon Valley, which has warmed to forming closer ties with the defense industry. "OpenAI builds AI to benefit as many people as possible, and supports US-led efforts to ensure the technology upholds democratic values," Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, said in a statement Wednesday. OpenAI's AI models will be used to improve systems used for air defense, Brian Schimpf, co-founder and CEO of Anduril, said in the statement. "Together, we are committed to developing responsible solutions that enable military and intelligence operators to make faster, more accurate decisions in high-pressure situations," he said.

Palmer Luckey Is Bringing Anduril Smarts to Microsoft's Military Headset The founder of Oculus VR is returning to headsets--this time for the battlefield. When Palmer Luckey was hacking together virtual reality headsets at his startup Oculus VR in the mid-2010s, he would sometimes imagine a future in which US soldiers used the technology to sharpen their battlefield senses. That vision is now virtually a reality after a deal that will bring software from his defense startup, Anduril, to a US Army head-mounted display developed by Microsoft. "The idea is to enhance soldiers," Luckey tells WIRED over Zoom from his home in Newport Beach, California. "Their visual perception, audible perception--basically to give them all the vision that Superman has, and then some, and make them more lethal."

A squad of soldiers is under attack and pinned down by rockets in the close quarters of urban combat. One of them makes a call over his radio, and within moments a fleet of small autonomous drones equipped with explosives fly through the town square, entering buildings and scanning for enemies before detonating on command. One by one the suicide drones seek out and kill their targets. A voiceover on the video, a fictional ad for multibillion-dollar Israeli weapons company Elbit Systems, touts the AI-enabled drones' ability to "maximize lethality and combat tempo". While defense companies like Elbit promote their new advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) with sleek dramatizations, the technology they are developing is increasingly entering the real world.