The Companies Changing Warfare Forever: Palantir & Anduril Execs on Drones, AI & the Future of War
4/6/20261 hr 9 min
(0:00) Friedberg Intros Palantir's Shyam Sankar and Anduril's Trae Stephens
(0:56) Palantir Origins: CIA Analyst Joins 20-Person Startup
(2:54) War, Deterrence & Silicon Valley's Defense Tech Taboo
(8:39) US vs China: Drone Gap, Shipbuilding & 2027 Taiwan Threat
(12:27) Anduril's Arsenal-1 Factory & Fixing US Munitions Supply Chain
(41:48) Autonomous Weapons, AI Decision-Making & Future of War
(47:15) Anthropic vs Pentagon: Ethics of AI in Combat
(50:39) Palantir Surveillance State Claims
(55:57) Anti-Defense Culture Origins: Vietnam, Snowden & Foreign Influence
Axon.ai — AppLovin's AI advertising platform reaches over a billion daily active users across mobile games. Full-screen video ads with a 35-second median watch time. Advertisers are profitably spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day and advertiser access is still in closed beta. The window is open at https://axon.ai/allin.
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Showing 10 of 12Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDavid Friedberg· Host0:00
Trey Stevens, Shaun Sankar, welcome to The All-In Podcast at the Hill & Valley Forum. Thank you guys for being here. What's up? How are you guys doing?
Shyam Sankar· Guest0:06
Thanks for having us.
David Friedberg· Host0:07
You good?
Trae Stephens· Guest0:07
Doing great.
Shyam Sankar· Guest0:07
Yeah.
David Friedberg· Host0:07
Okay.
Trae Stephens· Guest0:08
Good to be here too.
David Friedberg· Host0:08
You guys are friends, right?
Shyam Sankar· Guest0:10
Yeah.
David Friedberg· Host0:10
You guys go back a, like a long time?
Trae Stephens· Guest0:12
[laughs] A really long time.
Shyam Sankar· Guest0:13
Very long time.
David Friedberg· Host0:14
[laughs] Okay, tell us how you guys know each other. Palantir, Anduril, what's the connection and the history?
Shyam Sankar· Guest0:19
Well, I'll start. You can fill in all the gaps.
Trae Stephens· Guest0:21
I feel like I know the story you're gonna tell, and it's gonna be very uncomfortable.
David Friedberg· Host0:24
I'm going all in. [upbeat music] Every few years, a new ad channel opens before the market catches on. That's axon.ai right now. The AI ad platform behind one of the biggest runs in tech with access to over a billion daily active users. Full-screen video ads in mobile games watched for a median of 35 seconds. Businesses are profitably spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a day on it, and most advertisers don't even know it exists yet. The window is open at axon.ai/allin. I'm going all in.
Shyam Sankar· Guest0:55
So, Trey, I think, you know, in the early days of Palantir, I was roaming around giving demos to anyone who could possibly wanna see them. Trey was working in an intel agency and happened to see one of these demos, and he should tell you his version of it, his side of it, his frustration with bureaucracy. But I think he, he realized, like, "Hey, this, this might be really cool. Maybe I should, uh, leave the hellhole I'm in in the basement of this building, getting nothing done, talking about sports with other people to, uh, to go join this crusade." So Trey reached out and applied. Um, he, he made a big faux pas. He came all the way to Palo Alto, and he,