Palmer Luckey, the founder of Occulus who sold his company to Facebook for over $2 billion in 2014, has secured a major defense contract with the United States Army through his firm Anduril.

The agreement involves Anduril taking over the Integrated Visual Augmentation System (IVAS) project from Microsoft after the U.S. Army assigned responsibility for the system to Anduril. The IVAS contract is estimated at $22 billion and focuses on providing soldiers with advanced augmented reality capabilities, including heads-up displays, computer systems, and AI.

In a recent interview, Luckey detailed his company’s vision for military robotics. He described developing humanoid robots capable of operating existing military systems—such as missile defense networks—with physical abilities comparable to an 85-year-old person. These robots would replace human operators in tasks requiring routine monitoring, he explained.

Luckey emphasized that the goal is not to create autonomous weapons but to avoid outsourcing responsibility for violence to machines. “We need to kill people, and it needs to weigh on us,” he stated.

The company has been working on these systems for nearly a decade, with its most recent achievement being the acquisition of Microsoft’s mixed reality business—including the IVAS project—after Microsoft discontinued its HoloLens military variant. Luckey revealed that Anduril is now able to deploy a system comparable to what other companies would take eight years to develop in just six months.

Additionally, Luckey noted that Anduril has been working on defense applications for nearly a decade and has raised significant funding to accelerate innovation. His company aims to save taxpayers hundreds of billions through cost-effective military technology.

The interview also touched upon broader advancements in robotics and human-computer interfaces, including Brett Adcock’s prediction of home robots within two to three years and Max Hodak’s biohybrid neural interface technology that could connect the human brain to the cloud. Michael Andre is working at Eon on uploading the human connectome to the cloud by 2030.