Palmer Luckey Wants To Build A "Virtual" Border Wall

Palmer Luckey became a multi-millionaire selling VR company Oculus to Facebook. Now, his latest startup is looking to improve security at the US border using artificial intelligence.

» Subscribe to CNBC Make It.

In fact, Anduril Industries, the defense technology start-up Luckey founded in 2017, has already tested its border control tech in Texas and San Diego. In those tests, Anduril’s surveillance technology helped US border agents catch dozens of people who were trying to cross the border into the US without authorization.

When Luckey was only 21 years old, he sold Oculus, the virtual reality headset company, to Facebook for over $2 billion just a few years after creating the first prototype as a teenager working out of his parents’ garage.

His latest company’s AI-powered system, Lattice, uses a network of connected cameras and infrared sensors that can be set up along wide swaths of land, potentially covering hundreds of miles of the US border. The system’s AI-powered technology can scan for movement miles away while analyzing the source to see if it has spotted a person, a vehicle, an animal, etc.

Anduril’s technology has “a lot of applications. We’re securing military bases, we have sites that are on the U.S. border, we’re doing some programs we can’t talk about,” Luckey says.

In the case of border security, Lattice could make it easier for US border agents to monitor for unauthorized border crossings. Rather than agents scanning surveillance systems themselves, poring over footage from hundreds of miles of land looking for people and vehicles trying to cross the border without authorization, border agents would instead receive alerts from Lattice any time the system’s AI-powered technology identifies a potential unauthorized crossing in progress.

Border control is an obvious potential application for Anduril’s Lattice technology. The Lattice system lets border agents “know what they’re responding to [and] they can choose what the most important thing is to respond to, and they’re not going into every single situation treating it like it’s an elevated threat level because they have no idea what’s happening,” Luckey says.

After just a 10-week period of testing Lattice on a Texas ranch on the southern US border in 2018, Anduril’s technology helped border agents catch 55 people trying to cross into the US without authorization, US Customs and Border Protection told Wired last year.

Those border agents also seized 982 pounds of marijuana in those arrests (though, Wired notes that 39 of the 55 individuals apprehended were not carrying drugs). While the company’s results in Texas were part of an informal test on a privately-owned ranch, the San Diego office of US Customs and Border Protection also tested the Lattice technology in 2018, which resulted in an additional 10 people apprehended at the US border in the program’s first 12 days, according to Wired.

US Customs and Border Protection did not respond to CNBC’s request for updated information on tests of Lattice technology on the US border.

The US military has also tested Anduril’s Lattice system. In November, an official Twitter account for the US Marine Corps Base & Air Station Camp Pendleton near San Diego tweeted a video showing how the Marines use the Lattice system’s sensors, placed offshore of the oceanside military base, to detect unknown objects. Lattice drones can then relay live images back to the base in order to detect any potential threats.

Luckey’s company is testing its Lattice system on the US border at a time when few topics are more controversial in Washington, D.C. than immigration policy and border security.

Since December 22, the US government has remained stuck in what is now the longest-ever government shutdown due to a stalemate between Democratic leaders and the White House, where President Trump is insisting on $5.6 billion in federal funding to build a wall along the southern US border. Democrats have, thus far, refused to include the president’s requested border wall funding in any potential deal to reopen the government.

Luckey, who spoke to CNBC before the government shutdown began, believes that the idea of border security is essentially bipartisan. “No good policy can rely on having no idea what’s going on [at the border].”

About CNBC Make It.: CNBC Make It. is a new section of CNBC dedicated to making you smarter about managing your business, career, and money.

Connect with CNBC Make It. Online

Get the latest updates

Find CNBC Make It. on Facebook

Find CNBC Make It. on Twitter

Find CNBC Make It. on Instagram

Find CNBC Make It. on LinkedIn

#CNBC

#CNBCMakeIt

#BorderWall

Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey is making a ‘virtual’ border wall with A.I., and it’s already working | CNBC Make It.