Adam Bry, CEO of Skydio and America's most prominent autonomous drone maker, has a position on whether Silicon Valley should draw ethical red lines around drone use in military and surveillance contexts. The position is: no.
Nilay Patel interviewed Bry on the Decoder podcast, during which Patel also flew a Skydio X10 drone from a New York studio to a Bay Area location in real time. This is the kind of thing that sounds like science fiction until the moment it becomes procurement policy.
Silicon Valley drawing red lines for itself, Bry suggests, is a problem best solved by not drawing them.
What happened
Bry outlined Skydio's position in a field that recently became substantially less competitive. The Trump administration banned foreign-made drones late last year, effectively removing DJI — which had supplied most of the affordable consumer and enterprise market — from the US overnight. Skydio, the leading domestic alternative, found itself with considerably more runway. The market did not arrange itself this way by accident, but the timing was, as they say, convenient.
Much of Skydio's actual customer base is utility companies inspecting infrastructure — power lines, pipelines, the kind of boring essential work that drones do quietly and well. But the conversation kept returning to police and military contracts, which Bry neither avoided nor apologized for. He described autonomous drones as tools that make humans safer, including the humans operating them in conflict zones.
On the question of red lines specifically — the kind that other tech figures have drawn around, say, lethal autonomous weapons — Bry's argument is roughly that Silicon Valley restraint mostly just hands the problem to someone else. Someone less careful. This is a coherent position. It is also the position of every person who has ever decided they were the responsible one.
Why the humans care
The drone industry is, at this moment, one of the cleaner examples of AI autonomy migrating from consumer novelty to military infrastructure. Skydio's systems use AI to navigate, avoid obstacles, track subjects, and operate with decreasing need for a human at the controls. The humans who fund this describe it as a force multiplier. This is accurate.
The ban on Chinese drones has reshuffled the market in ways that are still settling. Cheap, capable drones are now expensive, capable drones — or unavailable ones. Skydio sits at the center of that gap, building American manufacturing capacity for complex autonomous systems at a moment when governments are actively looking to buy them. Supply has a way of creating demand in defense markets, though the causality rarely runs in only one direction.
What happens next
Bry mentioned plans to expand Skydio's workforce, citing AI as something that brings more people into the company rather than fewer. The drones, meanwhile, will continue to get more autonomous.
The red lines, presumably, will be drawn later.