The U.S. Army signed a 10-year contract with defense tech startup Anduril on Friday worth up to $20 billion, folding what had been more than 120 separate procurement actions into a single enterprise agreement covering the company’s hardware, software, infrastructure, and services.
The deal is structured as a five-year base period with an option to extend for another five. That architecture alone says something about how the Pentagon views Anduril: not as a vendor for a specific program, but as a platform partner across the Army’s entire technology stack. “The modern battlefield is increasingly defined by software,” said Gabe Chiulli, the chief technology officer at the DoD’s Office of the Chief Information Officer. “To maintain our advantage, we must be able to acquire and deploy software capabilities with speed and efficiency.”
Anduril was co-founded by Palmer Luckey, who built VR headset maker Oculus and sold it to Facebook before being pushed out after a news report tied him to a pro-Trump political donation. The controversy that ended his time at Facebook has not slowed his second act. According to a recent New York Times profile, Luckey and Anduril have found a receptive audience in the second Trump administration, which shares his vision of remaking the U.S. military around autonomous systems: unmanned fighter jets, AI-driven drones, submarines. The company brought in roughly $2 billion in revenue last year.
A $60 Billion Valuation and a Decade-Long Army Bet
The contract lands as Anduril is separately in talks to raise a new funding round at a $60 billion valuation, a figure that would place it among the most valuable private companies in the United States. The Army’s endorsement, backed by a decade-long commitment, gives that fundraise a significant anchor.
The timing also illuminates a broader reshuffling in the defense technology market. Anthropic is currently suing the Department of Defense over a supply chain risk designation that followed a failed contract negotiation. OpenAI signed its own Pentagon deal earlier this month and lost its robotics lead, Caitlin Kalinowski, who resigned in protest. Against that backdrop, Anduril’s clean sweep of the Army’s commercial technology procurement is a reminder of who benefits most when AI companies fight over the ethics of military contracts: the one that never had those doubts to begin with.
