Meta and Anduril’s AI war helmet

PLUS: Patients control AI and robotics with thought

Jennifer Mossalgue

October 14, 2025

Good morning, tech enthusiasts. Defense startup Anduril is turning soldiers’ helmets into AI-powered command hubs, blending battlefield data with real-time augmented reality.

Built with Meta, it’s Palmer Luckey’s high-tech comeback — but can it succeed where Microsoft's $21.8B goggles failed?

In today’s tech rundown:

Palmer Luckey’s AI war helmet
Strava sues Garmin, users freak out
Wayve powers toward $8B
Scientists crack mole-rat longevity code
Quick hits on other tech news

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

ANDURIL

🪖 Palmer Luckey's AI war helmet

Image source: Anduril

The Rundown: Anduril just unveiled EagleEye, a hyper-advanced, AI-powered mixed-reality system — built in partnership with Meta — that transforms soldiers’ helmets into real-time command centers.

The details:

The mixed-reality helmet delivers mission-critical overlays, spatial audio cues, live sensor streams, and real-time threat alerts through a heads-up display.
Operators see adversaries tagged in real time and can command drones or ground robots with voice or gesture — no screen-tapping, no breaking focus.
Variants span lightweight visors to full ballistic helmets, replacing the Army’s failed Microsoft IVAS goggles with gear soldiers might actually wear.
Onboard AI functions as a “guardian angel” co-pilot, auto-filtering comms and flagging threats before humans register them.

Why it matters: For Palmer Luckey, this is a triumphant return to VR after his messy Oculus exit. Backed by Meta, Qualcomm, Oakley, and Gentex, he’s secured $159M in Army contracts to mass-produce EagleEye and hardwire superhuman perception into the modern warfighter’s brain. Let’s see if it works out better than Microsoft’s attempt.

STRAVA

🏃🏽 Strava sues Garmin, users freak out

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: Strava has taken Garmin to court, alleging patent infringement and a breach of their decade-old data-sharing pact. And athletes are not happy, as the fitness giants clash over heatmaps, branding, and device integration.

The details:

Strava filed its lawsuit on Sept. 30, claiming Garmin violated both patents and a 2015 agreement that governed how the companies shared user data.
Garmin launched Connect+, a premium subscription service that directly competes with Strava’s paid model, effectively nuking their partnership.
Garmin also imposed new developer guidelines requiring its logo on every activity post, graph, and screen, which Strava called “blatant advertising.”
The lawsuit targets Garmin’s use of segments and heatmaps, features so ubiquitous that they’re baked into nearly every Garmin device on the market.

Why it matters: The Strava-Garmin lawsuit has gone viral on TikTok, where athletes are posting “mom and dad are fighting” memes while genuinely panicking about their data disappearing mid-training cycle. On Reddit, users are threatening a mass exodus, with paid subscribers declaring they’ll abandon Strava entirely if Garmin sync dies.

WAYVE

🚘 Wayve powers toward $8B

Image source: Wayve

The Rundown: London’s Wayve, a rising star in autonomous driving, is in advanced discussions with Microsoft and SoftBank for a funding round that could inject as much as $2B and push its valuation to $8B.

The details:

Wayve forgoes pre-mapped routes for an “AI-first” system that learns from real-world driving on the fly — no geofencing, no billion-dollar sensor arrays.
The deal follows Nvidia’s $500M letter of intent and last year’s $1B SoftBank-led round.
The company just launched U.S. testing in San Francisco and locked Nissan as its first major automaker partner.
Unlike competitors burning cash on custom robotaxi fleets, Wayve’s software-first model plugs into existing vehicles.

Why it matters: While Waymo and Cruise blanket their robotaxis with lidar and limit them to mapped cities, Wayve’s foundation model learns to drive anywhere. It’s a fundamentally different wager on how autonomous vehicles will actually scale, and tech giants are pouring billions into finding out if it works.

LONGEVITY SCIENCE

🧫 Scientists crack mole-rat longevity code

Image source: Wikimedia Commons / Reve

The Rundown: Scientists at Shanghai’s Tongji University reverse-engineered part of the naked mole-rat’s anti-aging cheat code, isolating four microscopic genetic edits that turbocharge cellular repair and essentially hack longevity.

The details:

The research, published in Science, reveals why naked mole-rats can fend off age-related diseases that ravage other mammals.
Four amino acid substitutions in the mole-rat’s cGAS enzyme transform it into a DNA repair accelerator, fortifying cells against disease.
The modified cGAS silences a “panic button” that normally triggers inflammation and cell death under stress, freeing cells to focus on repair.
Naked mole-rats can live up to 40 years, making them the longest-lived rodent species in the world by far, and their mortality rate does not increase with age.

Why it matters: When researchers engineered fruit flies with the mole-rat’s cGAS variant, lifespan increased 25%, suggesting the work could translate across species. While the research is in early stages, it reframes aging studies: it’s less about inevitable decline, more about targeting molecular switches that govern cellular resilience.

QUICK HITS

📰 Everything else in tech today

Google announced a $15B, five-year plan to build its largest-ever AI data center in Andhra Pradesh, India.

Apple faces another proposed class action from two neuroscience professors who claim the company used their copyrighted works to train its AI models.

Toyota aims to launch its first EV with mass-produced all-solid-state batteries as early as 2027, targeting breakthroughs in range, charging speed, and performance.

Andrew Tulloch, co-founder of Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab, has left the AI startup to rejoin Meta’s Superintelligence Lab.

Apple is nearing a deal to acquire key talent and tech from computer vision startup Prompt AI, beating out rival interest from Elon Musk’s xAI and Neuralink.

U.S.-based Nabla Bio, an AI protein design startup, signed its second multi-year drug discovery deal with pharma giant Takeda.

Google updated its “Work from Anywhere” policy so that even a single remote day in a given week now counts as an entire WFA week.

Elon Musk’s Boring Company is building the Dubai Loop, an underground electric transit system featuring 10.5 miles of tunnel and 11 stations, set to launch in 2026.

Salesforce announced it will invest $15B in San Francisco over five years, aiming to bolster the city’s position as a global hub for AI innovation.

TikTok will begin construction on a massive data center in northeastern Brazil in six months, backed by a $9.11B investment, Reuters reports.

Apple overhauled its bug bounty program, doubling the top reward to $2M for the most severe exploit chains and offering bonuses that can push total payouts to $5M.

Amazon says it will hire 250K workers for the holiday season across the U.S. for the third consecutive year.

COMMUNITY