On March 3, 2026, Bloomberg reported that Anduril was raising roughly $4 billion at a valuation near $30 billion. The same day, the New York Times published a profile of Palmer Luckey — fired from Facebook in 2017, founder of Anduril in 2017, now one of the most powerful figures in American defense technology. The next day, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and OpenAI signed a pledge at a NATO summit committing to military AI development. Every major Silicon Valley company is now building for the military. Eight years ago, a dozen engineers tried to make sure this would never happen.

Twelve Resignations

In May 2018, Gizmodo reported that about a dozen Google employees had resigned in protest over Project Maven — a Pentagon contract that used AI to analyze drone surveillance footage. The resignations followed months of internal debate. Bloomberg reported that influential engineers in Google's cloud division were refusing to work on the project. Thousands signed an internal petition demanding Google withdraw from the contract.

Google withdrew. The company announced it would not renew the Maven contract and published a set of AI principles that excluded weapons and surveillance systems "likely to cause overall harm." The protesters had won. Military AI was, for the moment, beyond Silicon Valley's red line.

The protesters did not stop military AI. They determined who would build it first.

The Founder

Palmer Luckey founded Anduril in 2017 — a year before the Maven protests. He'd been fired from Facebook after selling Oculus for $2 billion, amid controversy over his political donations. Facebook's loss of a VR founder became the Pentagon's gain of a defense contractor.

Anduril was designed for the vacuum that the Maven protests would widen. While Google, Microsoft, and Amazon hesitated over employee backlash and public scrutiny, Anduril hired engineers who wanted to build military technology. The company had no consumer brand to protect, no employee petition to worry about, no activist shareholders to appease.

April 2022
Sources: Palmer Luckey's AI-powered defense tech startup Anduril is in talks to raise at a valuation north of $7 billion
The Information

The trajectory from there was exponential. $450 million Series D in 2021. $7 billion valuation in 2022. A $1.5 billion Series F in 2024. A $2.5 billion Series G at $28.5 billion in June 2025. And now, March 2026: $4 billion more at roughly $30 billion.

Anduril valuation, eight years after Google dropped the contract that created the vacuum

The Return

The companies that dropped military AI didn't stay away.

Google's retreat lasted three years. By late 2021, Google was aggressively pursuing a major cloud computing and AI contract with the Pentagon. In December 2022, the Pentagon awarded Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle contracts for the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability — the successor to the JEDI contract that had prompted so much controversy. Google was back in the Pentagon's computing infrastructure. No employees resigned.

Meta's red line lasted until May 2025. Bloomberg described the Meta-Anduril partnership — EagleEye, a line of military XR systems — as "crossing a former hard red line in Silicon Valley." Meta, the company that fired Palmer Luckey, was now building military hardware with the company he founded.

OpenAI partnered with Anduril in December 2024 to deploy advanced AI systems for national security. The same month, Palantir and Anduril launched a consortium to accelerate AI military capabilities, with plans to bring other tech companies in.

The full circle took eight years. The company that dropped Maven now pledges military AI to NATO. The company that fired Palmer Luckey now builds military hardware with his startup. And the contract Google abandoned — Maven — was awarded to Palantir, whose system now integrates Claude for military operations.

Palantir's Maven

The Maven story is worth tracing specifically, because it reveals what happened to the project after Google left.

Project Maven — the Pentagon's Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team — didn't disappear when Google withdrew. It migrated. By December 2019, Palantir had won a $111 million Army contract to connect operational systems. By May 2024, the US Army awarded Palantir $480 million for the Maven Smart System. By March 2026, that system was integrated with Claude — Anthropic's AI — for military operations.

The project that Google's employees protested is now larger, more capable, and more deeply embedded in military operations than it ever was under Google. It runs on better AI (Claude instead of Google's 2018-era models). It's operated by a company (Palantir) that has no conflicted employee base. And the AI company whose model powers it (Anthropic) is fighting the Pentagon over the very safeguards that govern how Claude is used in systems like Maven.

The Numbers

The defense tech sector that grew in the vacuum is now larger than any single Big Tech military contract would have been.

raising $4B, March 2026
market cap as of May 2025
autonomous drone systems
the contract Google dropped

Google's Maven contract was worth roughly $15 million. The industry that formed in its absence is worth hundreds of billions. The vacuum was more valuable than the contract that created it.

Why the Line Moved

The Maven protesters operated on a specific theory: that technology companies could choose not to participate in military AI, and that this choice would constrain the development of military AI.

Both assumptions proved wrong. Technology companies could choose — and several did, temporarily. But the choice didn't constrain military AI. It redirected it. The Pentagon didn't stop seeking AI capabilities because Google said no. It found partners who said yes. And those partners, unburdened by consumer brands and activist employees, built the capabilities faster than Google's internal division ever would have.

The protesters didn't stop the weapon. They outsourced it.

By the time Google, Meta, and the others returned to military work, the landscape had changed in ways that made their return easier. Anduril and Palantir had normalized defense tech in Silicon Valley. Defense contracts no longer triggered employee revolts — partly because the employees who would revolt had already self-selected into companies that didn't do defense work, and partly because the culture had shifted. A Founders Fund partner and Anduril chairman told Wired in September 2024 that the defense tech stigma had "completely evaporated." Meta's Anduril partnership in May 2025 confirmed it.

The Full Circle

On March 3, 2026, a reporter profiles the man who was fired from Facebook and built a $30 billion defense company from the wreckage. On March 4, every company that once hesitated over military AI signs a NATO pledge to build it. The employees who resigned in 2018 moved the work from Google to Palantir and Anduril. They moved it from companies with safety cultures to companies without them. They moved it from a $15 million contract to a $30 billion company.

The red line didn't hold. It moved — in the opposite direction the protesters intended.