Inside Anduril and Meta’s quest to make smart glasses for warfare

Anduril and Meta are jointly developing augmented-reality smart glasses for the US Army under a $159 million prototyping contract called Soldier Born Mission Command (SBMC). The system aims to overlay battlefield data onto soldiers' fields of view, enable drone control via voice commands and eye-tracking, and integrate with Anduril's Lattice software platform — which recently secured a $20 billion Army integration contract. Anduril is also self-funding a separate helmet-integrated system called EagleEye. LLMs from Google Gemini, Meta Llama, and Anthropic Claude are being tested to translate natural language into commands. Key challenges include weight, battery life, dust/explosion resistance, offline AI inference, and the risk of information overload for soldiers. The Army isn't expected to select a production system until 2028 at the earliest, following Microsoft's cancelled $22 billion IVAS contract after the glasses failed viability tests.