About two months ago, Shield AI co-founder Brandon Tseng and one of his employees were in an Uber weaving through Kyiv, Ukraine. They were headed to a meeting with military officials to sell them on their AI pilot systems and drones, when suddenly his employee showed him a warning on his phone. Russian bombs were incoming. Tseng met his potential demise with a shrug. “If it’s your time to go,” he said, “then it’s your time to go.” If anything, Tseng, a former Navy SEAL, was itching for more action. Shield AI employees had previously been to much more dangerous areas in Ukraine, training troops on its software and drones. “I’m quite jealous of where they got to go,” Tseng said. “Just from an adventure standpoint.” Tseng embodies that quiet macho-ness that pervades most defense tech founders. When I met him last month at the company’s Arlington office, he showed off a knife displayed in his office engraved with the SEAL slogan “Suffer in silence.” The white walls, whose tops glowed with fluorescent lights (to look like a spaceship, Tseng said), were covered with slogans like “Do what honor dictates” and “Earn your shield every day.” I pointed out they were pretty intense. “Are they?” Tseng replied. In 2015, Tseng founded Shield AI alongside his brother, Ryan Tseng, a patent-awarded electrical engineer, with a clear mission: “We built the world’s best AI pilot,” he said. “I want to put a million AI pilots in customers’ hands.”

Full interview : Shield AI co-founder Brandon Tseng answers questions on the startup’s mission of building the world’s best AI pilot, the ethics of military AI use.