US legislative failures are giving China a strategic edge, Anduril exec says

Trae Stephens, co-founder of defense technology firm Anduril Industries, sharply criticized American lawmakers on Tuesday, warning that congressional dysfunction and Silicon Valley arrogance were handing China a strategic opening in the race for military and technological supremacy.

Speaking at the Hill and Valley Forum in Washington, Stephens told hundreds of executives and policymakers that the United States had no one but itself to blame for falling behind in what he called a “high-tech arsenal of autocracy” race with Beijing.

“Our federal government is not doing its job,” Stephens said. “It does not help us build great things. It does not solve hard problems. Frankly, it has abandoned its post.”

Stephens is a partner at San Francisco-based venture capital firm Founders Fund and the chairman of Costa Mesa, California-based Anduril, one of the largest defense tech companies backed by Silicon Valley.

At the conference, he ticked through what he called a generation of U.S. legislative failure. On immigration, he said that 70 to 80% of Americans support comprehensive reform and yet Congress has passed nothing meaningful in 40 years.

On healthcare, he said the United States spends roughly double what peer democracies spend, with worse outcomes. On education, he said the U.S. has fallen out of the top 10 in educational attainment and is “lagging far behind competitors in math and science” just as artificial intelligence is upending the labor market for recent graduates.

He was particularly withering on infrastructure spending, telling the audience that more than a trillion dollars allocated under recent chip and green-energy legislation had produced little more than “a handful of lousy EV charging stations and not a single fully built chips fab.”

“We haven’t even sent a man to the moon in my lifetime,” Stephens said. “‘It’s too hard’ or ‘someone else is going to do this’ aren’t excuses that cut it anymore in the 21st century.”

Stephens argued that lawmakers were structurally incapable of keeping pace with technological change, saying that Facebook had 2 billion users before the first platform regulation was put in place, that drones became weapons of war before any laws governed their use against domestic threats, and that trillions of dollars in cryptocurrency changed hands before the government could agree on what it was.

“If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail,” he said. “When your main tools are investigations and the bully pulpit, the rules they write are often already obsolete by the time they take effect.”

But Stephens was equally sharp toward the technology industry, arguing that Silicon Valley’s years of resistance to Pentagon work had helped adversaries grow stronger. He recalled how software engineers pushed back against projects like Project Maven in the 2010s while parts of the technology establishment helped enable China to become “stronger, richer and more capable.”

“There is no moral neutrality in that decision,” he said.

His remarks came as Anduril this week began production at its new $1 billion Arsenal-1 manufacturing campus south of Columbus, Ohio, which is expected to employ more than 4,000 people over the next decade. The facility will initially produce the company’s FURY autonomous combat drone , Anduril’s entry for the U.S. Air Force’s Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which pairs uncrewed platforms with human fighter pilots.

国防技术公司 Anduril Industries 的联合创始人特雷·斯蒂芬斯周二严厉批评了美国立法者，警告说国会的失能和硅谷的傲慢正在给中国在军事和技术霸权的竞争中提供一个战略机会。

斯蒂芬斯在华盛顿举行的希尔和瓦利论坛上向数百名企业高管和政策制定者表示，美国在与北京的“高科技专制武器库”竞赛中落后，只能怪自己。

斯蒂芬斯说：“我们的联邦政府没有尽到职责。它没有帮助我们建设伟大的事业，也没有解决棘手的问题。坦白说，它已经放弃了自己的职责。”

斯蒂芬斯是旧金山风险投资公司 Founders Fund 的合伙人，也是总部位于加州科斯塔梅萨的 Anduril 的董事长，Anduril 是硅谷支持的最大国防科技公司之一。

在会议上，他细数了他所谓的美国一代人的立法失败。关于移民问题，他说，70%到80%的美国人支持全面的移民改革，然而国会40年来却没有通过任何有意义的法案。

在医疗保健方面，他指出，美国的医疗支出大约是其他民主国家的两倍，但医疗效果却更差。在教育方面，他表示，美国的教育水平已跌出前十，并且在数学和科学领域“远远落后于竞争对手”，而与此同时，人工智能正在颠覆应届毕业生的就业市场。

他对基础设施支出尤其进行了严厉批评，他告诉听众，根据最近的芯片和绿色能源立法分配的超过一万亿美元，却只产生了“寥寥几个糟糕的电动汽车充电站，而没有建成一个完整的芯片制造厂”。

“在我有生之年，我们甚至还没把人送上月球，”斯蒂芬斯说。“‘太难了’或者‘别人会去做’这些借口在21世纪已经行不通了。”

斯蒂芬斯认为，立法者在结构上无法跟上技术变革的步伐。他指出，Facebook 在第一部平台监管条例出台之前就已经拥有 20 亿用户，无人机在没有任何法律规定其用于应对国内威胁之前就已经成为战争武器，数万亿美元的加密货币在政府能够就其本质达成一致之前就已经易手。

“如果你只有一把锤子，那么所有问题看起来都像钉子，”他说。“当你的主要工具是调查和舆论平台时，他们制定的规则往往在生效时就已经过时了。”

但斯蒂芬斯对科技行业的批评同样尖锐，他认为硅谷多年来对五角大楼工作的抵制，反而助长了对手的实力。他回忆起2010年代软件工程师们如何抵制诸如“Maven计划”之类的项目，而部分科技界人士却在帮助中国变得“更强大、更富有、更有能力”。

他说：“这项决定没有任何道德中立性可言。”

就在本周，安杜里尔公司位于俄亥俄州哥伦布市南部、耗资10亿美元的全新“阿森纳-1”制造园区正式投产。预计该园区将在未来十年内创造超过4000个就业岗位。安杜里尔公司表示，该园区初期将生产其自主作战无人机“狂怒”（FURY）。“狂怒”是安杜里尔公司参与美国空军“协同作战飞机”（CCA）项目的方案，该项目旨在将无人平台与战斗机飞行员相结合。