Anduril founder Palmer Luckey wants to arm the U.S.’s allies. Could his insistence on deferring to Washington scare them off?

Palmer Luckey is clear when asked whether he would sell weapons to North Korea. “If the U.S. asks me to, yes.”

Anduril, the defense-technology startup Luckey founded in 2017 after his politically charged departure from Facebook, could be set for a $60 billion valuation. The company is riding a record surge in global defense spending and a shift in Silicon Valley sentiment toward working with the military, selling autonomous systems such as its Fury drone and Ghost Shark submarine to U.S. partners including Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. 

War in the Middle East—between high-tech planes on the side of the U.S. and Israel, and relatively low-tech drones and missiles on the side of Iran—is also revealing how current-day warfare is changing, and how manufacturing capacity can quickly become stretched. 

But as Anduril grows into one of America’s most closely watched weapons makers, Luckey’s position—that arms makers should function as extensions of U.S. government policy—puts him at the center of overlapping debates about alliance politics in Asia, the rise of Chinese military hardware, and how much power tech billionaires should wield over questions of war and peace.

“I’m never going to promise to do something the U.S. wouldn’t do,” he told Fortune in early February, on the sidelines of the Singap...