Palmer Luckey’s eyes light up, and he talks a mile a minute, when discussing his company’s new recruiting event: the AI Grand Prix. 

This is a drone flying contest with a twist. Rather than humans operating drones, the drones must operate autonomously. The humans will be tested on their software-writing skills that cause the drones to outfly their competition.  

There are prizes ranging from a $500,000 pot to be spilt amongst the highest-scoring teams, to jobs at Anduril, and a chance to bypass the company’s standard recruiting cycle. 

“It was something that I decided we should do,” Anduril founder Luckey said in an interview with TechCrunch. Luckey and the team were meeting to discuss recruitment strategy, he recalled.

Someone suggested sponsoring a drone racing tournament, which was somewhat in line with the company’s previous marketing tactics. For instance, Anduril sponsors the NASCAR Cup Series race known as the Anduril 250. 

Luckey generally liked the idea but then said, “‘Guys, that would be a really dumb thing for Anduril to sponsor. The whole point, our entire impetus and reason for being, is this pitch that autonomy has finally advanced to where you don’t have to have a person micromanaging each drone,’” he recalled, then adding, “‘What we should really do is sponsor a race that’s about how well programmers and engineers can make a drone fly itself.’” 

After discovering that such an event didn’t exist, the company opted to create it themselves. Interestingly, though, Luckey pointed out that the teams in the AI Grand Prix will not be flying Anduril’s drones, but those built by another defense tech startup: Neros Technologies. According to Luckey, Anduril’s drones are too physically big to run in the contained course in Ohio where the finals will take place.  

“We talked about having teams use Anduril drones, but Anduril doesn’t make any drones that are of the ultra-high speed, very small nature that you would want for a Drone Racing League. It’s mostly bigger stuff,” he said.  

Anduril is also partnering with one of the established racing leagues, the Drone Champions League to operate the event, as well as JobsOhio. The final race will take place in Ohio (where Anduril’s key manufacturing facility is located). 

Although Luckey is clearly excited about how fun the event will be, he won’t be a racer himself. “I absolutely will be there,” he says, but “it’s going to be about who can build the best software to pilot these drones.”  

He smiled and said, “I’m not actually a very good software programmer. I’m more of a hardware guy. I’m an electromechanical and optical guy, and I know just enough about coding to glue stuff together in a way that works for my prototypes.”  

(Luckey calls Anduril CEO Brian Schimpf “our de facto lead software brains” at the company.) 

The founder is hoping for at least 50 teams, and already has interest from multiple universities, he said. Should this competition be a successful event, the plan is to expand it into races with the other types of autonomous vehicles.

“We are starting with these quadcopter racing drones, which is what people expect from drone racing. However, we want to be, in the future, applying AI racing to other platforms as well,” he said.  

Underwater AI racing, ground AI racing, potentially even AI racing of spacecraft were some of the ideas Luckey shared.

The contest is open to all international excluding teams from Russia.  

“The difference with Russia is they are actively engaged in the act of invading Europe,” he said.

The concern is that the people qualified to enter such a race may also be working for their nation’s military. “I would love to have everybody, but we’re not the Olympics,” he added.

Luckey said the event was following the lead from the World Cup, which has also excluded Russia. 

Interestingly, teams from China (home to a lot of autonomous engineering) are welcome, despite it being the country that U.S. autonomous weapons hawks often name as their biggest fear.

Should a Chinese team win, the prize of a job at Anduril, which makes weapons used by the U.S. military, would not be a given. “If you work for the Chinese military, you’re not going to be allowed to get a job at Anduril,” Luckey said. Certain laws apply, he pointed out. In fact, there will still be some interviews and qualification process for all the job candidates.

The competition will take place across three qualifying rounds beginning in April with the final Grand Prix race scheduled for November.