Palmer Luckey Is Launching a Genetically Engineered War Dog Startup

It is a truth universally acknowledged that rich people love a designer dog.

TikTok influencers walk their viewers through the process of cloning their dearly departed pugs. If you’ve got enough money, you can get a genetically-engineered hypoallergenic beagle. And, of course, pre-CRISPR genetic abominations created with simple old-school breeding are all over the American suburbs. (Did you know the creator of the Labradoodle called the breed his life’s great regret? People usually hate it when I tell them that.)

It’s no surprise, then, that weapons-tech entrepreneurs—being wealthy and ostentatious—would get in on the designer-dog market. Enter Warhound, the brainchild of Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey—disgraced former Rep. Matt Gaetz’s brother-in-law—and Ben Lamm, the guy who has spent the last several years saying his startup Colossal will bring back extinct animals like the wooly mammoth.

Warhound, announced Thursday, has already raised $200 million in seed funding to create genetically engineered “war dogs” for the US military. That money comes from investors including far-right billionaire Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC, which shares leadership with Palantir, and In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm founded by the CIA and linked with far-right billionaire Peter Thiel. (Luckey’s other startup ideas include a proposal to profit off “oxytocin doping,” the proposed use of bonding hormones to keep women from divorcing their husbands.)

The military currently employs about 1,600 dogs, mostly for bomb- and drug- sniffing purposes. Usually, they’re standard-issue Belgian Malinois or German Shepherd dogs. According to a Warhound press release, 80 percent of these dogs are currently sourced from Europe, though some are bred in the US. Less than half of dogs who begin the military’s training program finish it.

Lamm believes dogs could be enhanced for health, longevity, and “for things like speed and agility or enhance olfactory sensors for bomb sniffing and whatnot,” he told TechCrunch this week. Anduril, meanwhile, would provide “advanced cybernetic Augments, software, and battlefield situational awareness.”

It wouldn’t be Lamm’s first time engineering a canine: last year his company, Colossal, bred three hybridized grey wolves with long, white hair. Colossal branded the canines as “dire wolves”—a species that has been extinct for about 10,000 years—though skeptical scientists noted that they were merely genetically-modified versions of extant wolves, not a whole-cloth recreation of an extinct species. Similarly, the Warhound dogs will reportedly be based on the Belgian Malinois and German Shepherd, though Lamm has said he intends to create “a new type of dog.”

Among other things, the “warhounds” are another manifestation of the right-wing obsession with genetic optimization—you could call it the science of good genes. As Silicon Valley races to engineer designer genius babies, putatively to thwart the AI threat, they’ll have designer war dogs to protect them.

“Led by CEO David Spirk, the company will reduce dependence on a shrinking European supply chain and strengthen America’s ability to protect its own people, infrastructure, and national security interests,” Warhound’s representatives wrote in a press release that describes dogs as if they were critical minerals. Spirk, a former Marine Corps intelligence analyst, also recently worked for Palantir with a focus on “expanding the company’s software footprints across the U.S. government.”

The dogs do not yet exist, but Warhound says it hopes to begin producing them within two years. And its founders have friends in high places in the US government.

“If we’re going to be in anguish about losing a species, now we have an opportunity to bring them back,” Doug Burgum, Trump’s secretary of the interior, said in 2025, as he attempted to gut the endangered species list. “Pick your favorite species and call up Colossal.”