Trae Stephens’ origin story begins like the first volume of a spy thriller series. Galvanized by 9/11, he vowed as a high schooler to find a career that would let him defend his country. He applied to colleges with programs that could prep him for that heroic role. After graduating, he joined a US intelligence agency, where he used his education as a “computational linguist” to do a kind of desktop counterterrorism.
During his time at the agency, Stephens met people at a Silicon Valley startup called Palantir, which set out to use deep data mining to win government contracts. Stephens signed on and later joined the venture capital firm backing Palantir, Founders Fund. He reports to Peter Thiel, the Valley’s most notorious conservative.
In 2016, Stephens wound up running the Trump transition team for the Department of Defense. That experience set him up to co-found Anduril, a military contractor that infuses AI and mixed reality into defense tech. His key co-founder was VR wizard Palmer Luckey. Anduril started by building “smart battlefields” and later ordnance, including autonomous fighter jets and arms-ready submarine drones.
Stephens believes that the stigma around defense tech is fading. With the geopolitical realities setting in, people are looking to work on things that will move the needle for humanity. Anduril just raised funding to help build a “hyperscale” factory to make thousands of relatively low-cost autonomous weapons. Stephens argues that this is necessary to maintain an advantage and deter large-scale conflict.
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