Tech
Palmer Luckey: Every country needs a ‘warrior class’ excited to enact ‘violence on others in pursuit of good aims’
After a three-minute hype video, complete with HD footage of drones colliding and military vehicles exploding, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey stepped onto the stage at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, on Tuesday afternoon. In an hour-long conversation with Pepperdine University president Jim Gash, the billionaire raged against America’s adversaries, endorsed completely autonomous weapons, and hinted at an Anduril IPO.
In 2017, Luckey co-founded defense tech company Anduril, last valued at $14 billion, with Trae Stephens, Matt Grimm, Joe Chen, and Brian Schimpf. He made it clear he had no hesitation about Anduril building weapons.
“Societies have always needed a warrior class that is enthused and excited about enacting violence on others in pursuit of good aims,” he told Gash. “You need people like me who are sick in that way and who don’t lose any sleep making tools of violence in order to preserve freedom.”
Luckey, donning his usual uniform of a Hawaiian shirt and mullet, walked Gash through the early hours of the war in Ukraine — and why he believes Anduril could’ve made a big impact. Luckey said he first met Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in 2019, after Zelenskyy had read about Anduril in a Wired article. He asked Luckey if Ukraine could acquire some of Anduril’s border control technology. “Unfortunately, the State Department wasn’t really wasn’t really keen on Ukraine at that point in time,” Luckey said.
“Look, if we were able to provide real-time intelligence with targeting-grade tracks of all of Russia’s most critical weapons systems to Ukraine days before their air force was eliminated, before their long range precision fires were exhausted, ” he said. “I think that could have made a really big difference.”
Anduril did end up supplying weapons to Ukraine by week two of the war, according to Luckey.
He then aligned himself with many Silicon Valley founders and called for unfettered AI development (Anduril’s products are powered by its AI platform, Lattice). He insisted there is currently “a shadow campaign being waged in the United Nations right now by many of our adversaries” to trick Western countries into not aggressively pursuing AI.
“[Our adversaries] use phrases that sound really good in a sound bite: ‘Well can’t you agree that a robot should never be able to decide who lives and dies?’” Luckey said. “And my point to them is, where’s the moral high ground in a landmine that can’t tell the difference between a school bus full of kids and a Russian tank?”
The development of completely autonomous weapons — weapons that do not need a human’s input on who lives or dies — is incredibly controversial. The US government does not purchase them, and even Anduril co-founder Stephens has said he would not want to build them. “Human judgment is incredibly important,” he told Kara Swisher last year. “We don’t want to remove that.”
Luckey ended the talk by hinting at Anduril’s desire to eventually go public. “The reality is for political reasons, practical reasons, financial reasons, a privately traded company is never going to win something like the trillion-dollar joint strike fighter [jet] effort,” he said. “It’s just not going to happen. Congress won’t allow it to happen.”
People have floated the possibility of being acquired. “I just point to how that went from me last time,” Luckey said, referencing how he was pushed out of Facebook in 2016 after selling his previous startup, virtual reality company Oculus.
As he got up to leave, Gash tried to gift him a leather-bound collection of “The Lord of the Rings,” which is where Luckey got the name “Anduril.” But Luckey politely declined. “I cannot fit that on my motorcycle,” he said.
Tech
Cosmetics giant Rituals confirms data breach of customer membership records
Netherlands-based cosmetics giant Rituals has confirmed a data breach affecting customers’ personal information after hackers stole reams of data from its membership database.
The company disclosed the breach on Wednesday, according to an email sent to customers that TechCrunch has viewed and verified.
Rituals said it identified an “unauthorized download” of members’ data in April that contained customers’ full name, date of birth, gender, postal and email address, and phone number, as well as their preferred Rituals store and account type.
When reached by TechCrunch, Rituals spokesperson Eline van Malssen said the hacker stole membership data about customers in Europe and the United Kingdom.
TechCrunch has learned that some customers notified by Rituals are based in the United States. The spokesperson confirmed the incident also affects some U.S. customers.
Rituals did not describe the nature of the cyberattack and the company said its investigation was underway to understand how the data breach happened.
The cosmetics giant is the latest retailer to have customer membership data stolen in the past year, following a string of intrusions at U.K. grocery and shopping chain Co-op and Marks & Spencer, among others. Customer records can be attractive targets for hackers who steal the data and extort the company for a ransom in exchange for not publishing the information online.
When reached with questions about the incident, a Rituals spokesperson declined to comment on whether the company received any communication from the hackers, to share a more precise timeline of the breach, or to provide the exact number of affected members, citing unspecified “security reasons.”
According to its website, Rituals has over 41 million customers in its membership database. The retail giant made €2.4 billion euros ($2.8 billion) in revenue in 2025.
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Tech
Rivian R2 production has started despite tornado damage to factory
Rivian has rolled the first customer-ready R2 SUVs off the production line at its factory in Normal, Illinois, just days after it was hit by an EF-1 tornado that tore off part of the roof.
Despite the damage, founder and CEO RJ Scaringe told Bloomberg Television on Wednesday morning that Rivian doesn’t expect any delays to the R2’s rollout, which is crucial to the company’s survival.
“The tornado went through the south end of the plant, and ripped the roof off the building, and knocked down some of the plant as well, and so the last 72 hours have been around the clock,” he said. Scaringe explained that Rivian has had to change how and where it brings some materials into the factory to build the R2.
But “we’re not making any changes to the plan,” he said, referring to the company’s production roadmap.
Scaringe wasn’t asked when Rivian will make the first R2 deliveries during the interview. The company has previously said it will start shipping R2 SUVs before the first half of 2026 comes to an end.
Getting the R2 into production is a major milestone for the company. It’s the first production vehicle Rivian has made that has a chance to reach mass-market customers, as it costs far less than the company’s current R1 EVs. It’s also supposed to help the company finally reach profitability after years of losing money on every vehicle it sold.
The company has big expectations for the R2. Rivian told investors earlier this year that it expects to deliver between 20,000 and 25,000 of the SUVs by the end of 2026. If Rivian achieves that, it would become one of the fastest-scaling new EVs ever launched in the U.S., second only to Tesla’s Model Y.
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That said, Rivian is launching with a version of the R2 that costs nearly $13,000 more than the $45,000 price tag the company spent years promoting. The launch edition R2 starts at $57,990, with a slightly cheaper $53,990 variant coming by the end of this year. Rivian won’t sell an R2 for under $50,000 until the first half of 2027, and a true base model starting at $45,000 won’t hit the market until late 2027.
And that’s if the $45,000 R2 ever arrives at all. When Rivian announced pricing for the SUV in March, the company said the base model price will start “around $45,000” — not “at $45,000” as it had promoted on its website as recently as February.
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Tech
AI Overviews are coming to your Gmail at work
During its Google Cloud Next conference on Wednesday, the company announced a slew of Workspace-focused updates, including the addition of its AI Overviews feature to Gmail. The feature, which today uses AI to summarize Google Search results, will now do the same for Gmail users in the workplace.
According to Google, this will allow Gmail users to ask questions in search using natural language and then get concise answers without having to open and read different emails.
The company suggests the feature could be used to ask business-related questions about topics typically shared in emails, like those about performance improvements, project milestones, invoices, comments on decks, trip details, and more with straightforward answers.
The AI Overview will create an instant summary pulled from across multiple emails and conversations.
While not everyone prefers to have AI as their first step to finding an answer, it is rapidly becoming the norm, both within Google’s products and elsewhere on the web.
In this case, Google says the AI Overviews in Gmail will be the default setting if the company has Gemini for Workspace in Gmail enabled, and if Workspace Intelligence access to Gmail is enabled. (End users must have “Smart features in Gmail, Chat, and Meet” and “Google Workspace smart features” enabled, too.)
The feature was previously available to consumers with Google AI Pro and Ultra subscriptions. Google says it will also now come to business, enterprise, and education customers as well through the following products:
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- Business: Business Starter, Standard, and Plus
- Enterprise: Enterprise Starter, Standard, and Plus
- Consumers: Google AI Pro and Ultra
- Other Editions: Frontline Plus
- AI Add-ons: Google AI Pro for Education
Alongside the launch, Google said it’s also making AI Overviews in Drive broadly available to eligible Workspace and Google AI plans. It was previously in beta.
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Cosmetics giant Rituals confirms data breach of customer membership records
Rivian R2 production has started despite tornado damage to factory
