💥 When AI Goes to War

The Street

⚔️ Anduril’s AI War Machine Is Built for a New Kind of Battlefield

Palmer Luckey doesn’t look like your typical defense contractor. He shows up to major interviews in flip-flops, a Hawaiian shirt, and a mullet. But behind the beachwear is a $14 billion company that’s quietly becoming one of the Pentagon’s most important tech partners.

The entrepreneur who created Oculus—and it sold to Meta for $2B when he was just 21—is now trading virtual reality for real-world defense.

Luckey’s latest company, Anduril Industries, is on a mission to reinvent how the U.S. fights wars—by replacing fragile human command chains with AI-powered autonomy. Its latest move? Fury, a new autonomous fighter jet that skips the cockpit and runs entirely on code.

🛩️ The Jet With No Pilot—and No Chill

Unveiled for the first time to cameras this spring, Fury looks like a stealth fighter from the future. But unlike the jets you’ve seen in Top Gun, there’s no seat, no stick, and no Tom Cruise piloting it.

This is a Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA)—a next-gen drone designed to fly ahead of manned aircraft, scout for threats, and even strike targets, all while keeping human pilots out of harm’s way.

It’s fast, cheap(er), and built to scale: Instead of relying on ultra-specialized military parts, Fury runs on commercial components that can be sourced from machine shops across the U.S. It’s designed to be deployed en masse—not just one superplane, but a swarm.

But what really sets Fury apart isn’t what’s on the outside. It’s the brain that runs it.

🧠 Meet Lattice: The Brain Behind the Bot

At the heart of Anduril’s war tech is Lattice, a real-time AI platform that powers everything from surveillance towers to autonomous drones. It’s built to do what human operators can’t:

• Ingest massive amounts of battlefield data

• Make sense of it instantly

• Coordinate a response in seconds

Lattice doesn’t just run Fury. It’s already managing real-world defense scenarios—like detecting and tracking threats at military bases and the U.S.-Mexico border. In one demo, a single operator with just a few laptop clicks used Lattice to:

• spot an unknown vehicle

• dispatch a drone

• ID a threat

• send a second drone to intercept

That level of automation isn’t just cool—it’s critical. In modern warfare, success doesn’t go to the side with the biggest bombs, but to the one that processes and acts on information the fastest.

👀 The Big Picture

The military isn’t just buying drones—it’s buying into a software-first approach to warfare, where code is more important than caliber. Anduril is positioning itself not as a weapons company, but as a platform for the battlefield of the future.

Luckey puts it plainly: “This isn’t just about building a plane. It’s an entirely new way of fighting.”

If the Pentagon agrees, the next war might be fought less with boots on the ground—and more with algorithms in the cloud.

💡How To AI: Automate the Small Talk

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is one of the best use cases for AI—because it’s all about keeping track of people, setting reminders, and doing somewhat repetitive tasks. While AI can’t build these relationships for you, it can help you stay on top of every touchpoint.

Here are a few examples that your standard, free chatbots handle like a pro:

• Prioritize leads instantly: Drop your spreadsheet into ChatGPT and ask it to “Group these leads by who’s most likely to close this month.”

• Instant client insight: Paste feedback from discovery calls and ask, “What are the top 3 pain points these clients mention?”

• Slide into DMs, smarter: Use AI to write non-cringe cold messages like, “Pitch my branding services in a casual, 1-sentence Instagram DM.”

• Turn chaos into calendars: Drop a messy thread of client emails into Cluade and ask, “Summarize key deadlines and deliverables, and turn this into a timeline I can share.”

There are plenty of AI-powered tools built to streamline CRM—but HoneyBook makes it feel refreshingly effortless.

Less of a platform, more of a partner

Take your independent business to new heights with the behind-the-scenes partner that manages clients, projects, payments, and more.

Plus, HoneyBook’s AI tools summarize project details, generate email drafts, take meeting notes, and predict high-value leads.

Try HoneyBook for free

Heard in the Server Room

Grok Got Hacked—By Its Own Team

Last week, Grok—the chatbot from Elon Musk’s xAI—started inserting “white genocide” claims into chats, often totally unprompted in a chat. xAI blamed the issue on a “rogue” internal employee who tampered with Grok’s system prompts, violating company policies. This wasn’t a typical hallucination; it was a human override. The incident highlights a broader risk: LLM’s can be reprogrammed at will, raising serious security, bias, and trust concerns. When your “truth-seeking AI” starts pushing propaganda, it’s less artificial intelligence and more artificial influence

New NVLink Fusion Allows Companies To Plug And Play—The Nvidia Way

At Taiwan’s Computex 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unveiled NVLink Fusion—a major shift that allows companies to pair Nvidia’s powerful GPUs with chips from other manufacturers. NVLink, Nvidia’s high-speed technology that lets chips communicate more efficiently, was previously limited to Nvidia’s own hardware. Now, it’s open to third-party chips, giving companies greater flexibility to build custom AI systems. The move signals Nvidia’s ambition to become the backbone of AI infrastructure—even in systems that aren’t entirely built with Nvidia components.

Union Finds Lack Of Good Faith On AI Darth Vader Voice Disturbing

SAG-AFTRA, the union representing Hollywood actors, is going full Sith on Llama Productions, filing an unfair labor complaint after the Epic Games subsidiary allegedly used AI to voice Darth Vader in Fortnite—without looping in the union. The union claims this move sidestepped negotiations and replaced real actors’ work with synthetic sound. (Hey, if the voice fits...) Chalk it up as the latest clash in Hollywood’s ongoing battle over AI in entertainment.

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The EU Wants to Be Known for More Than Baguettes and Bureaucracy

The EU has all the ingredients to create a thriving AI and tech scene—talent, capital, ambition, and world-class education. But it’s struggling to “unleash that potential at scale.” As one top European venture capitalist put it: “We’re in a supercycle, and we can’t afford to be leashed.”

What’s stopping the EU from keeping pace with the U.S. and China?
The EU passed the AI Act just over a year ago, and while designed to ensure ethical AI, it risks paralyzing innovation before it starts.

While the U.S. sprints ahead (occasionally tripping over its own code), European founders are busy decoding licensing rules, labor laws, and compliance frameworks that differ country by country across the EU.

But it’s not just about keeping up in the global AI race—the EU sees tech independence as key to self-sufficiency. With U.S. support fading, Europe must “fend for itself” and build with sovereignty in mind.

🧠 Built on Borrowed Brains
Here’s the catch: while U.S. investors pour billions into foundational models created by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, Europe is focused on the applications layer. That means the EU’s AI ecosystem depends on tech it didn’t create. It’s a smart strategy for speed, but it raises a tough question: can you really claim tech sovereignty if your entire ecosystem was built in San Francisco?