As competition between the U.S. and China intensifies in artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey believes the real battle isn’t just over technology—it’s over who is training the world’s best students.
The 33-year-old defense tech leader argued that American universities have drifted away from teaching practical skills, leaving China with a growing advantage that goes beyond cheap labor.
“American companies have been hollowed out because our companies feed these colleges a whole bill of goods on what they should be teaching people,” Luckey said earlier this year in conversation with the Hoover Institution.
“Basically, we’re not teaching engineers how to be engineers anymore.”
He pointed to China’s growing bench of technical expertise, adding that the Asian nation now has many of the world’s best battery engineers, metallurgists, and optical engineers. The U.S. instead has conceded to training people to become what he calls “architecture astronauts.”
