Palantir and Anduril form partnership, as Sauron funded • The Register

Two tech businesses that were independently named after objects from The Lord of the Rings have formed a partnership – or should that be a fellowship?

According to a Friday announcement, analytics outfit Palantir and autonomous systems vendor Anduril have formed “a new consortium to ensure that the US government leads the world in artificial intelligence” and “deliver the technological infrastructure, from the edge to the enterprise, that can enable our government and industry partners to transform America’s world-leading AI advancements into next-generation military and national security capabilities.”

Tolkien aficionados among you may recall from your knowledge of Middle Earth that a “Palantir” – or “seeing stone” – is a crystal orb that allows wonky real-time communication between devices, with users able to view those who use other stones, divine something of their mental state, and even view past events. If you’re not a Tolkien reader, think of it as a kind of magical proto-Zoom with telepathic and time travel modules available on some licenses.

“Anduril” was the name given to the re-forged sword “Narsil,” which was broken in battle before Isildur took up its shards and used them to cut the One Ring from the hand of Sauron – setting in train the events eventually chronicled in The Hobbit and The Lord Of The Rings.

The word “Anduril” literally means “Flame of the West” in Tolkien’s invented Elvish tongue Quenya. The Register fancies the founders of Anduril – the business – knew that when they chose the name, given its focus on US national security.

Palantir’s name is also likely no accident, given the stones allowed perception of far-off locations and the ability to divine users’ intentions – the kind of analytics Palantir the company promises it can deliver.

Anduril and Palantir will work together to solve “two main problems that limit the adoption of AI for national security purposes.” The first of these is that the US military is not retaining sensor data collected by vehicles and weapons that could be used to train AI.

“Exabytes of defense data, indispensable for AI training and inferencing, are currently evaporating. What should be America’s ultimate asymmetric advantage over our adversaries is instead our biggest lost opportunity,” the partners state in their announcement.

The other issue is the lack of a secure enterprise pipeline that would allow use of that data to create AIs.

The combined entities plan to combine some of their products to address the issues.

Elsewhere in Middle Earth …

News of the Tolkien-themed tie-up came a day after The Washington Post reported that a startup named Sauron has won $18 million in funding for a home security system aimed at the wealthy.

In Tolkien’s mythology, Sauron is the embodiment of evil on Earth and in The Lord of the Rings manifests as an enormous, fiery, all-seeing eye.

Sauron, the startup, apparently makes “deterrence pods” that contain drones capable of detecting anyone who approaches a location where they are installed – scanning their faces, and shining a searchlight on anything the system deems suspicious.

The Register very much wants these businesses to succeed and start acquiring each other so we can write stories with headlines like “Palantir’s Sauron acquisition severed by Anduril.” ®