Anduril Industries is a major beneficiary of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which includes a section that essentially grants the weapons firm a monopoly on new surveillance towers for U.S. Customs and Border Protection across the southern and northern borders.

The legislation, signed into law by President Donald Trump on July 4, provides significant spending increases to military and law enforcement projects, including over $6 billion for various border security technologies. Among these initiatives is expanding the ever-widening “virtual wall” of sensor-laden surveillance towers along the U.S.-Mexico border, where computers increasingly carry out the work of detecting and apprehending migrants.

Anduril, today a full-fledged military contractor, got its start selling software-augmented surveillance towers to CBP. Anduril has pitched its Sentry Tower line on the strength of its “autonomous” capabilities, which use machine learning software to perpetually scan the horizon for possible objects of interest — i.e. people attempting to cross the border — rather than requiring a human to monitor sensor feeds. Thanks to bipartisan support for the vision of a border locked down by computerized eyes, Anduril has become a dominant player in border surveillance, edging out incumbents like Elbit and General Dynamics.

Now, that position looks to be enshrined in law: A provision buried in the new mega-legislation stipulates that none of the $6 billion border tech payday can be spent on border towers unless they’ve been “tested and accepted by U.S. Customs and Border Protection to deliver autonomous capabilities.”

The bill defines “autonomous” as “a system designed to apply artificial intelligence, machine learning, computer vision, or other algorithms to accurately detect, identify, classify, and........

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