Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced “Project Meridian: The Future of Warfare,” a study of automated and AI-powered weapons.
Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press
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Carolyn Kaster/Associated Press
A new Pentagon study focused on the future of warfare raises ethical concerns about potential conflicts of interest among its authors.
Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced “Project Meridian: The Future of Warfare,” a study of automated and AI-powered weapons.
Besides former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, the other two leaders of the project are Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, and Palmer Luckey, co-founder of defense technology company Anduril. The study is expected to last 120 days.
“We are seeing rapid advances in artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics, biotechnology, among other critical high-tech areas. Together, these new areas, new ways of fighting, and technological developments will profoundly change the character of warfare,” Hegseth said in his September 30 announcement. “To maintain global dominance, the United States must anticipate future operating environments and act decisively to develop the tools necessary to dominate there.”
The study’s announcement came just days before President Trump’s expected speech Tuesday at Anduril’s Baltimore facility.
Palmer Luckey, co-founder of Anduril Industries, at an event in 2023. President Trump will speak at the Anduril facility on Tuesday.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
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Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images
Anduril Industries builds military drones used on land, sea and air, as well as other related defense technologies. The company received its initial funding from tech billionaire and conservative political activist Peter Thiel.
SpaceX has secured more than $8 billion in U.S. defense contracts in 2026 alone, according to government contract announcements. One of its flagship products is Starshield, a military-grade satellite network in low Earth orbit designed to provide secure communications to the government. The company’s AI chatbot, Grok, is also used by the Pentagon.
There are concerns that Musk and Luckey’s study is driven by their own financial interests, said Richard Painter, a corporate law professor at the University of Minnesota and former chief White House ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration.
“They all want to sell stuff,” Painter said. “So if we go there, let’s understand that (Musk), like every other entrepreneur, he wants to make a lot of money selling AI to the Department of Defense. Whatever he comes up with, it’s not like he’s doing it as a neutral utility.”
“This is a huge conflict of interest,” said a former senior Defense Department official who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration. The official said that not only do Luckey and Musk hold billions of dollars in current defense contracts, but the study could also shape the types of munitions the United States buys in the future. For example, he might recommend more drones or space assets — which Luckey and Musk are building — and fewer tanks, which they are not building.
Hegseth said he asked Emil Michael, the Department of Defense’s chief technology officer, to commission Project Meridian through the MITER Corporation, a nonprofit corporation that manages federally funded research across the country. Few details were disclosed about the scope of the project in Hegseth’s one-page memo.
“MITRE is responsible for the analysis and recommendations, and will evaluate all contributions with technical rigor while applying appropriate conflict of interest and information safeguards,” a Department of Defense spokesperson said. “Project Meridian will examine the technologies and operational concepts necessary to maintain U.S. military advantage across future warfighting domains over a 10- to 20-year time horizon.”
Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, during a White House event on artificial intelligence on September 29, 2026.
Finn Gomez/Getty Images
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Finn Gomez/Getty Images
The Defense Department did not disclose whether Musk and Luckey were hired as special government employees — as Musk was when he led the Department of Government Efficiency’s cost-cutting efforts — or as contractors. The nature of their employment on the project would dictate the rules they would have to follow, Painter said.
Executive branch employees are subject to federal criminal law that prohibits them from participating in government decisions that affect their own money or the financial interests of their families and businesses. However, entrepreneurs are not subject to this law.
The Defense Department did not respond to questions about potential conflicts of interest related to hiring Musk and Luckey to lead the Meridian Project study. SpaceXAI and Anduril did not respond to requests for comment on their CEOs’ potential conflicts of interest.
While it is common for the federal government to convene working groups with industry leaders, the findings and recommendations of the Meridian Project study will need to be scrutinized, a senior Government Accountability Office official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press on issues on which they have not released reports.
“There are guarantees that they are supposed to sign to keep them out of procurement activities and so on,” the GAO official said. “This does not mean that we should not pay attention to the outcome of the project.”
In addition, the motivations for creating this working group are unclear, the official said.
“I don’t know why we would need a new working group to discuss something since a lot of people have been thinking about this issue for a while,” the official said. “What good would that do?”
Another former Pentagon official who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation from the administration was less concerned. The official said many efforts were still underway at the Pentagon and across the military services to think about the future of warfare, and all of those efforts would likely feed into Project Meridian. The former official said it’s one thing to be on such a panel and make recommendations, and Congress accepts or rejects them, and another for a panel member to write a requirement for a defense system and then bid.
The second Trump administration applied different ethical standards than administrations before it, including owning stock in companies that stand to profit from government-awarded contracts, Painter said.
“I don’t know why they kept their defense stocks. Under the Bush administration, we made everyone who went to the Department of Defense sell their defense stocks,” Painter said. “I’ve never seen so many financial conflicts of interest in any other administration. Even the first Trump administration wasn’t as bad as this one.”
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