Meta, Anduril discuss AR glasses for U.S. Army

Meta and Anduril have been working together on U.S. Army mixed-reality gear since at least May 29, 2025, when the companies announced a partnership to design and field XR products for the American military. The latest mention came in a May 18, 2026 episode of the “ChatGPT News” podcast, whose description said the show covered Meta and Anduril’s collaboration on AR glasses for the U.S. Army. (anduril.com) The underlying project is not a fresh announcement from this week. It sits inside a longer Army effort to replace or rework the troubled Integrated Visual Augmentation System, or IVAS, the headset program originally awarded to Microsoft in 2018. In February 2025, Microsoft and Anduril said Anduril would assume oversight of production, future hardware and software development, and delivery timelines for IVAS, pending Defense Department approval. (news.microsoft.com) Meta’s role is the consumer-tech side of that equation. Anduril said the partnership would draw on more than a decade of investment by both companies in hardware, software and artificial intelligence, and that the products would use technology originally built for commercial use. In the companies’ description, Meta brings AI and AR work developed through Reality Labs, while Anduril contributes its defense software stack, including the Lattice command-and-control platform. (anduril.com) Anduril has described the military use case in direct operational terms. The companies said the joint XR products are meant to give warfighters “enhanced perception” and more intuitive control of autonomous platforms on the battlefield. Anduril also said the mixed-reality capabilities would integrate with Lattice to deliver real-time battlefield intelligence through role-specific AR and VR interfaces. (anduril.com) The Army program itself has already moved beyond concept language. Anduril said in September 2025 that it had received a $159 million Army contract for an initial prototyping period under Soldier Borne Mission Command, the program formerly known as IVAS Next. The company said that work covered a night-vision and mixed-reality system intended to combine augmented reality, AI and mission-command tools in one soldier-worn platform. (anduril.com) That helps explain why recent coverage has focused less on ordinary smart glasses and more on soldier-worn displays, helmets and heads-up interfaces. MIT Technology Review reported on May 18, 2026 that Meta and Anduril had been in the Army’s augmented-reality contest for about a year. Defense News, citing the May 2025 announcement, reported that the devices were expected to use Meta’s Llama AI model and Anduril’s Lattice software to provide soldiers with a heads-up display of battlefield intelligence in real time. (technologyreview.com) The corporate angle is also notable because it reunites Meta with Palmer Luckey, the Oculus founder whose startup Facebook bought in 2014 and who later founded Anduril. In the May 2025 announcement, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Meta was “proud to partner with Anduril” to bring the technologies to U.S. service members, while Luckey said he was “glad to be working with Meta once again.” (anduril.com) What comes next is more testing and prototyping rather than a consumer launch. Anduril has said Soldier Borne Mission Command is aimed at delivering soldier-tested capability, and the Army’s SBMC program page says the effort is meant to provide soldiers and squads a modular digital-awareness platform. The podcast episode appears to have surfaced that ongoing work for a general tech audience, rather than breaking a new contract award. (cpeground.army.mil)