Anduril CEO Palmer Luckey says the defense tech company will ‘definitely’ go public
Defense tech startup Anduril Industries will go public, founder and CEO Palmer Luckey said Tuesday.
“We are definitely going to be a publicly traded company,” he told CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime.” “We are running this company to be the shape of a publicly traded company.”
He added that there isn’t “really a path” for a company like Anduril to win significant trillion-dollar defense contracts without going public.
Luckey did not detail an IPO timeline.
Since its founding, Anduril has risen to become one of the most highly valued private U.S. technology companies and is an innovator in the defense tech space, chipping away at competition from industry leaders Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.
The company, which ranked No.1 on the CNBC Disruptor 50 list this year, was created by Luckey in 2017 after he was pushed out by Meta. Luckey sold his virtual reality headset company Oculus to Facebook in 2014.
Despite Luckey’s ousting, the companies announced a joint partnership to create virtual and augmented reality devices for the U.S. Army last month.
“I’m working with Meta because we’ve buried the hatchet and because there’s a lot of incredible technology that they have, that paired with Anduril, can make a huge difference for the American war fighter,” he said.
Anduril has continued to scoop up funding despite a difficult deal environment that’s just beginning to reopen for IPOs after a multi-year drought.
Chairman Trae Stephens told Bloomberg last week that Anduril recently raised $2.5 billion at a $30.5 billion valuation. That more than doubles its valuation from a funding round in August led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund.
Anduril recently took over Microsoft‘s $22 billion augmented-reality headset program with the U.S. Army. The company also unveiled a partnership with OpenAI in December, and announced plans to invest roughly $1 billion in a manufacturing facility in Ohio earlier this year.
WATCH: Anduril tops CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list, watch full interview with Founder Palmer Luckey
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang attends a roundtable discussion at the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris on June 11, 2025.
Sarah Meyssonnier | Reuters
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang sold 100,000 shares of the chipmaker’s stock on Friday and Monday, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
The sales are worth nearly $15 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The transactions are the first sale in Huang’s plan to sell as many as 600,000 shares of Nvidia through the end of 2025. It’s a plan that was announced in March, and it’d be worth $873 million at Tuesday’s opening price.
The Nvidia founder still owns more than 800 million Nvidia shares, according to Monday’s SEC filing. Huang has a net worth of about $126 billion, ranking him 12th on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The 62-year-old chief executive sold about $700 million in Nvidia shares last year under a prearranged plan, too.
Nvidia stock is up more than 800% since December 2022 after OpenAI’s ChatGPT was first released to the public. That launch drew attention to Nvidia’s graphics processing units, or GPUs, which were needed to develop and power the artificial intelligence service.
The company’s chips remain in high demand with the majority of the AI chip market, and Nvidia has introduced two subsequent generations of its AI GPU technology.
Nvidia continues to grow. Its stock is up 9% this year, even as the company faces export control issues that could limit foreign markets for its AI chips.
In May, the company reported first-quarter earnings that showed the chipmaker’s revenue growing 69% on an annual basis to $44 billion during the quarter.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic CEO, speaking on CNBC’s Squawk Box outside the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Jan. 21st, 2025.
Gerry Miller | CNBC
Anthropic‘s use of books to train its artificial intelligence model Claude was “fair use” and “transformative,” a federal judge ruled late on Monday.
Amazon-backed Anthropic’s AI training did not violate the authors’ copyrights since the large language models “have not reproduced to the public a given work’s creative elements, nor even one author’s identifiable expressive style,” wrote U.S. District Judge William Alsup.
“The purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate new text was quintessentially transformative,” Alsup wrote. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer.”
The decision was a significant win for AI companies as legal battles play out over the use and application of copyrighted works in developing and training LLMs. Alsup’s ruling begins to establish the legal limits and opportunities for the industry going forward.
A spokesperson for Anthropic said in a statement that the company was “pleased” with the ruling and that the decision was, “Consistent with copyright’s purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress.”
CNBC has reached out to the plaintiffs for comment.
The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, was brought by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Wallace Johnson in August. The suit alleged that Anthropic built a “multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.”
Alsup did, however, order a trial on the pirated material that Anthropic put into its central library of content, even though the company did not use it for AI training.
“That Anthropic later bought a copy of a book it earlier stole off the internet will not absolve it of liability for the theft, but it may affect the extent of statutory damages,” the judge wrote.
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