Skydio CEO Adam Bry thinks Silicon Valley should stop drawing red lines for military use of drones, arguing that democratic processes and battlefield realities make such corporate policies dangerously misguided.
Bry, who runs the largest US drone manufacturer, made the case in a Decoder interview while discussing everything from the $6,000 R10 indoor drone to the $3.5 billion factory expansion the company just announced.
Why Corporate Purity Policies Fail
"If you try to draw these lines to establish purity... the US military is going to follow it. Our adversaries or terrorists are not going to follow the terms of service," Bry said. "You end up on the wrong side because the 'good guys' will follow the policy and bad actors won't."
Bry directly addressed the grenade-dropper experiments the Army ran on Skydio platforms. His response: it's not Skydio's place to decide. He points out that young soldiers whose lives are on the line are the ones who should make those calls, not engineers in Silicon Valley offices.
This puts Skydio squarely at odds with companies like Anthropic that impose use-case restrictions on their models. Bry rejects that approach as fundamentally naive about how technology actually competes in contested environments.
The $3.5 Billion Bet on US Manufacturing
Skydio manufactures all its drones in the US, a decision Bry says was originally practical, not political. "We build better products faster when engineering and manufacturing are together," he explained. Now it's a strategic necessity.
China sanctioned Skydio about 18 months ago, forcing the company to scramble for non-Chinese battery supplies. Today, all first-level dependencies are outside China, though Bry admits tracing second- and third-tier suppliers is nearly impossible.
The X10, the drone Bry demoed remotely from New York, starts at roughly $15,000 for the standalone system. With a dock and cloud software, the annual cost hits about $25,000 per drone. The R10 indoor drone costs $6,000 and was built in 15 months.
The Cost Gap Volunteer Fire Departments Can't Close
When pressed about how volunteer fire departments that used $800 DJI drones can now afford Skydio's systems, Bry didn't promise a cheap consumer model. Instead, he argued that dock-based autonomous drones provide way more capability per dollar because they fly 5 to 10 times more hours than hand-flown units.
"The F10 has something like a 50-mile coverage radius from its docking station," Bry said. "Click a button and it shows up 10 minutes later, 30 miles out." His calculus: the total cost of ownership including training and human pilot time beats the upfront price tag.
Bry admitted he'd love to build a consumer drone again but can't justify splitting focus from the enterprise and defense markets. "I really hope somebody else does," he said.
Democracy as the Feedback Loop
On surveillance concerns, Bry pointed to Skydio's Transparency Dashboard that shows camera footprints on the ground for every flight. He argued that local police contracts require city council approval, and that the democratic process gives communities real agency.
"Every community ultimately gets to decide for themselves," Bry said, citing Ring and Flock Safety as examples where public scrutiny drove policy changes.
The next frontier for Skydio is scaling US manufacturing to compete head-to-head with China on both capability and cost. Bry is convinced that the autonomous, dock-based future gives the US an edge, but only if the factory floor catches up to the software stack.
Source: Skydio CEO Adam Bry on why Silicon Valley shouldn't draw red lines for drone use
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