Luckey has received secretive Air Force contracts to develop next-generation artificial intelligence capabilities under the so-called Project Maven initiative, as The Intercept reported. Similar to Google — whose participation as a subcontractor on Maven was confirmed by the Pentagon — there is no known public procurement record of Anduril subcontracting on Maven. While it is unclear whether Anduril was serving as a prime or subcontractor, Google worked underneath Virginia-based staffing firm ECS Federal, which was named as the major Project Maven prime contractor in a heavily redacted report released by the Defense Department’s Office of Inspector General in January.
Anduril and Looking Glass share an early investor, Lux Capital co-founder Josh Wolfe. Wolfe has become a prominent advocate of Silicon Valley venture capital playing a more prominent role in the Department of Defense; he even recruited the former head of U.S. Special Operations Command, Tony “T2” Thomas, as a venture partner at the beginning of 2020.
Wolfe has periodically tweeted updates on the progress ofLooking Glass’s holographic technology, using a “Star Wars” X-wing fighter as an example in February 2018. The Pentagon’s now-scrapped cloud computing initiative,JEDI, would be unveiled the following month and — according to reporting from ProPublica — the C3PO acronym had been blocked from use in the project.
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