Anduril has become one of the fastest-growing defense technology companies. CEO Brian Schimpf joins CNBC’s Arjun Kharpal to discuss how AI is transforming modern warfare, why autonomous weapons still require human oversight, and how Anduril is scaling defense manufacturing. They also examine U.S.-China competition, supply chains, and the future of defense technology.<br>See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

How Silicon Valley is changing warfare

The Tech Download

The Lord of the Rings, my favourite franchise ever, is having a bit of a moment right now. There's reports of a new video game, there's a new film in the works. Is anyone else excited about this? Hello and welcome to another episode of CNBC's The Tech Download. I'm Arjun Kharpal, Senior Technology Correspondent here at CNBC. Why was I talking about Lord of the Rings?

Well, because the focus of this episode is Anduril. Anduril is a legendary sword from the Lord of the Rings and you'll hear a bit more about that in the episode. Because I speak to Brian Schimpf, who's the co-founder and CEO of Anduril. Now Anduril is a defence technology company. If we think about the last few decades, defence industry hasn't changed at all really very much.

It's dominated by a few big players, building highly complex, very expensive systems over long periods of time, often costing billions and billions of dollars. But that model is really now being challenged by a handful of startups that are popping up. A new generation of companies really, mainly coming out of Silicon Valley with that Silicon Valley mindset. Or trying to rethink how the technology is built and how it's being deployed. And instead of focusing just on building hardware, which is obviously a key part of the equation here.

They're focused on the software side, artificial intelligence and how to manufacture this kind of product cheaply and quickly as well. No doubt it has been a state of geopolitical flux. There have been multiple wars around the world. And we've seen during those conflicts that the nature of warfare itself is also changing from these large, expensive platforms to more nimble, cheaper, smaller and faster, at times autonomous systems.

How Silicon Valley is changing warfare

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

How Silicon Valley is changing warfare

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.