Palantir and Anduril reportedly building a tech consortium to bid on defense contracts

Two big defense tech players, Palantir and Anduril, are talking to tech companies including SpaceX, OpenAI, Saronic, and Scale AI about forming a consortium to bid on Pentagon contracts, according to a report in the Financial Times.

The goal, the FT says, is to challenge the dominance of “prime” defense contractors like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Boeing. One unnamed participant described this as an effort to “provide a new generation of defense contractors,” while another said this will be a more efficient way to sell the government cutting-edge weapons and other tech.

Initial partnerships could be announced as soon as January, according to the report.

Palantir and Anduril (both named after magical items in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”) hinted that something like this was in the works earlier this month, with an integration announcement between Palantir’s AI Platform and Anduril’s Lattice software. At the time, the companies said they were “launching a new consortium to ensure that the U.S. government leads the world in artificial intelligence.”