Trae Stephens on Anduril's Origins, Palantir DNA, Just War Theory, & Peter Thiel
FULL INTERVIEW
Trae Stephens
Trae Stephens, Co-Founder & Executive Chairman of Anduril, & Partner at Founders Fund, joins Sourcery for a BTS conversation on Anduril’s founding in 2017, when defense tech was “incredibly unpopular,” the cultural shift that turned it into a major Silicon Valley innovation frontier, & how software, autonomy, manufacturing scale, and ethics now converge in modern warfare.
→ Listen on X, YouTube, Spotify & Apple
Stephens explains Anduril’s core thesis: software-defined, hardware-enabled, & why they’re building a multi-domain autonomy strategy across sea, ground, air, & space. He also outlines the manufacturing view that “the factory is the weapon,” including Anduril’s expansion into scaled production with Arsenal-1 (a planned ~5 million sqft campus near Columbus, Ohio) & their broader network of facilities & partners.
The conversation also covers ethics & strategy: Stephens discusses Just War Theory (St. Augustine), the goal of increasing precision while removing humans from “dull, dirty, dangerous” roles, and the broader cultural shifts shaping America.
Lastly, Stephens reflects on lessons from Palantir and Founders Fund, including Peter Thiel’s influence, concentration in venture, and “zero-to-one” strategy, and shares what he looks for when investing in founders.
Main Points:
• From pariah to next-gen prime
• 007 Story (thank you to Jeff Miller for the rec)
• Palantir DNA in hardware
• “The factory is the weapon” Arsenal-1
• Just War Theory & autonomy
• Thiel’s zero-to-one playbook
This is Part 3 of 4 of our interview series with Anduril’s Founders, in addition to our compiled video, check them all out!
5 Key Takeaways
Anduril’s origin story is inseparable from a cultural shift: launched in 2017 when defense tech was “pariah” status, then rode (and helped shape) a major reversal in perception.
Core identity: software-defined, hardware-enabled: Stephens argues Anduril is often misread as “hardware,” but the core is software and shared autonomy components across domains.
Multi-domain is the strategy: undersea, surface, ground, air, and space are treated as one connected competitive landscape, with reusable autonomy building blocks.
“The factory is the weapon” → scale as deterrence: U.S. manufacturing atrophied; Anduril is oriented around rebuilding capacity to produce at very high volumes, anchored by Arsenal-1 and other facilities.
Ethics + precision as the trajectory of warfare: Stephens frames autonomy as part of a long historical move toward precision and discrimination (Just War Theory), aiming to reduce risk to humans and collateral harm.
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Trae Stephens, Co-founder & Executive Chairman Anduril
(01:03) Rise of defense tech & Pete Hegseth visit
(03:58) Origin of Anduril & James Bond dreams
(05:18) Anduril’s multi-domain defense strategy
(06:42) China’s subsidies & US government investments
(08:46) “Factory is the weapon” & re-industrialization
(10:30) Arsenal-1 Ohio factory
(13:44) What people get wrong about Anduril
(17:08) Biggest Lesson from Palantir
(19:04) Just War theory & defense ethics
(22:16) Cultural shift from AI slop to good quests
(23:49) How Anduril is building “Apple for defense”
(27:03) Founders Fund investments: Varda, Armada, Cognition, General Matter
(29:52) Why is Peter Thiel always right?
EXCLUSIVE BONUS:
→ Watch Trae ask COO Matt Grimm for help cutting a pencil in half.
Top 10 Quotes
Origins
“When we started Anduril in 2017 as kind of the pariah of Silicon Valley, it was like not something people were doing. It was incredibly unpopular, and now all of a sudden there’s like almost nothing as popular. Maybe AI slop, enterprise SaaS companies are slightly more popular, but you know, defense tech is right up there.”
“Defense as a sector is multi-domain, and so you have things under the sea, things on the surface of the sea, ground vehicles, aerial vehicles, and space. And the Anduril strategy is we want to cover the whole gamut. We don’t have like a niche approach to delivering autonomy in any single domain.”
“People think about us as like a hardware company where we’re building all of these big systems, many of which you can probably see in the background of the camera here, but the core of everything that we do is actually software.”
“From day one in Anduril, we were starting from where Palantir was in year ten. And so kind of a great cheat code.”
Reindustrialization
“The factory is the weapon.”
“Even if there was complete labor cost parity, we still don’t have the ability to just magically reshore a lot of these critical components that are going to be important to the next fifty or hundred years.”
Ethics & Just War Theory
“Pacifism as an idea is only possible inside of a governing system with a monopoly on violence. Like you can’t be a pacifist without a government monopoly on violence. That’s just not possible for humanity.”
Just war theory, which was developed over a thousand years ago by Saint Augustine, talks about how you engage in lethal defense activity in the most ethical way possible…
If you look back at the course of all human civilization, you had this massive ramp up in lethality… until the atomic bomb in 1945. And at that moment, I think humanity looked around at each other and they said, ‘I don’t think we want to do this.’ And so from then until modern day, you see the climb back down the ladder…
We’ve become really, really good at being accurate. People are constantly talking about the freak out of the intersection of AI and defense and autonomy and what does that do from an ethics perspective. The goal is take humans out of dull, dirty, dangerous jobs… and become as accurate and precise as possible.
And that’s really what just war theory is all about, principles of discrimination, principles of just cause, like how good is the information, do we know for sure that this action we’re going to take is actually going to address the problem that needs to be solved.”
“The goal is take humans out of dull, dirty, dangerous jobs. So we’re not putting our men and women, brothers and sisters, in horribly dangerous situations, and become as accurate and precise as possible.”
Peter Thiel
“The most annoying lesson I’ve learned from Peter Thiel is that he is always right, and it’s really, really, really annoying.”
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