The Pentagon will look to develop new artificial intelligence-guided planes, offering two contracts that several private companies have been competing to obtain. The Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) project is part of a 6 billion program that will add at least 1,000 new drones to the U.S. Air Force. These drones would deploy alongside human-piloted jets and provide cover for them, acting as escorts with full weapons capabilities that could also act as scouts or communications hubs, The Wall Street Journal reported. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and Anduril Industries have all taken up the challenge. General Atomics supplied the Reaper and Predator drones the U.S. has deployed in numerous campaigns in the Middle East, and Anduril is a newcomer to the field, founded in 2017 by inventor Palmer Luckey, an entrepreneur who founded Oculus VR.

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It's no secret that Palmer Luckey's Anduril Industries has been developing a "virtual wall" to heighten national security -- he's been at it for the better part of three years. That work (for better or worse) has finally paid off. According to a new report from the Washington Post, the Trump administration awarded Anduril a lucrative five-year contract to erect hundreds of AI-powered surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border by 2022. "These towers give agents in the field a significant leg up against the criminal networks that facilitate illegal cross-border activity," said Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott in a statement released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Anduril's hardware almost looks like it belongs in orbit, rather than sitting amid desert scrub.

At the height of the 2016 presidential contest, then-Facebook executive Palmer Luckey was a Silicon Valley star when he donated $10,000 to an anti-Hillary Clinton group. Six months later, he was out – reportedly fired for his political positions. Now, Luckey runs a new venture, backed by Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, that is reportedly valued at more than $1 billion. In the new FOX Nation documentary "Artificial Intelligence: The Coming Revolution," Fox Business Network anchor and'Mornings with Maria' host Maria Bartiromo went inside Luckey's Anduril Industries, which is at the forefront of America's race to use artificial intelligence to protect national security. "The thing about the United States is that we are at a strategic disadvantage because of the ethics that we have. We're not willing to play dirty. Russia and China don't have a problem with any of those things," Luckey told Fox Nation.

Robots must be smarter if they're going to pack boxes in warehouses, scan inventory in stores, and even care for the elderly. The rise of machine learning in recent years is making that possible. Steady innovation has led to robots that can independently "learn" to navigate tight corridors and grasp delicate objects without crushing them. Some of the leading American and Japanese robotics companies and investors recently gathered in Menlo Park, Calif. to discuss artificial intelligence in robotics and its impact on business. But it may require some cooperation between the U.S. and an important overseas ally.

Palmer Luckey's Anduril Industries has won a contract on the Pentagon's controversial AI program, Project Maven, reports The Intercept. Since founding the company in 2017, Luckey has focused on the defense industry, building advanced systems that could be used for border surveillance. Project Maven is a controversial artificial intelligence program that uses machine learning to sort through millions of hours of drone footage to help systems distinguish people from their surroundings. The project would help reduce the burden on human analysts and improve the intelligence that's captured in cameras. The project's goal is to get better information to military officers, with the idea that with better decisions, there's less of a change of mistakes that result in civilian casualties.

Palmer Luckey, the virtual reality pioneer, left Facebook in 2017, six months after it was discovered that he had secretly funded a pro-Trump campaign group dedicated to influencing the US election through "shitposting" and "meme magic". The 25-year-old Oculus founder now has a new venture, Anduril Industries, this time supporting Trump's immigration policies directly through the creation of a surveillance system designed to detect unauthorised crossings of the Mexican border. Anduril Industries is one of a growing number of companies playing on the fear of "bad hombres" to cash in on government contracts for hi-tech virtual alternatives to physical wall. From drones and sensors to AI-powered facial recognition and human presence detection, these surveillance systems promise cheaper border control but at what cost to civil liberties? "These systems are reflective of advances in sensor and analytics technologies that are going to have serious repercussions for Americans' privacy," said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU.