The Interceptor is a small black box with four propellers that spots drones and rams them from below, at high speed, aiming to smash them out of the sky.
The “hard kill” Interceptor can be used together with a system of sensors and cameras to detect and attack drones to protect soldiers or critical installations.
But its maker, the defence startup Anduril, insists that it is not the first step to autonomous warfare, where drones and robots fight each other without explicit human consent.
“I can’t imagine a scenario when humans are taken out of the loop,” said Matt Grimm, one of Anduril’s co-founders and its chief operating officer, adding that he did not “accept the premise that the natural end is all out autonomous robot conflict.”
Describing autonomous weapons as unattractive for logical, financial and ethical reasons, he said none of Anduril’s customers have asked the company to develop such tools.
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Nevertheless, the 18-month-old Anduril has raised eyebrows as a tech start-up that is willing to pursue the controversial government and military contracts that the rest of Silicon Valley is too squeamish to handle.
The company was founded by 2017 by the then 24-year-old Palmer Luckey, who made hundreds of millions of dollars selling his virtual reality company Oculus to Facebook but then claimed he was fired for donating to a Donald Trump campaign group.
“Everything we’re doing is in coordination with the US government,” said Brian Schimpf, co-founder and chief executive. Anduril’s work is “an extension of Department of Defense policy,” he added.
“Most of the work we’ve done has been very defensive,” he added. Weapons are “not something we’re rushing into.”
Before Anduril, Mr Schimpf spent nearly a decade at secretive data analysis company Palantir, including as director of engineering. He is one of several Anduril executives to have spent time at Palantir, a company that has been similarly criticised for working with the US government on projects that some say threaten people’s privacy.
Both companies are backed by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of Paypal who was Silicon Valley’s highest profile supporter of Mr Trump ahead of the 2016 election.
Only a handful of the projects that Anduril has worked on are publicly known. The company declined to disclose how many contracts it had in total, but said around half had been made public.
It is best known for its Lattice surveillance system, which uses cameras and other sensors to track and interpret movement, and has been deployed by Customs and Border Protection (cbp) along the US border with Mexico. This year, the US Marines and UK Royal Navy signed contracts for the system, and CBP signed three additional contracts for Lattice, with a fourth pending.
An information graphic explaining Anduril’s Lattice virtual perimeter wall system
Anduril also works with the Pentagon on Project Maven, an initiative to develop AI tools for the military. Google chose not to continue working on the controversial project last year, following an employee backlash that saw dozens of workers resign on ethical grounds.
Anduril’s Interceptor drones have been sold to several customers including the US defence department, and will soon be deployed overseas. Several countries have been looking at ways to tackle drones, with the UK government saying on Monday that “the counter-drone industry that will provide this equipment is small but evolving rapidly”
