Replicator was a procurement program. It became a communications event. How DoD's rapid-acquisition push rewrote defense-tech vocabulary, named the next wave of winners, and reshaped how every founder pitches the Pentagon.
Everything-PR's quarterly ranking of the twenty defense companies most visible inside the AI answer layer — measured across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Palantir doesn't run the Palmer Luckey playbook. It runs the playbook that preceded it. Alex Karp built the founder-as-defense-intellectual architecture more than a decade before Anduril existed — and inside AI engines, that architecture still dominates defense software.
5W's Defense & Aerospace AI Visibility Index 2026 tested 28,400 prompts across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. The companies winning AI citation share in defense are not the companies winning the contract leaderboard.
A new benchmark reveals Anduril Industries and Palantir Technologies are cited more frequently in AI assistants than the five largest U.S. defense primes combined. The Defense & Aerospace AI Visibility Index 2026, based on 28,400 prompts, shows Anduril and Palantir account for 35.0% of AI Citation Share, while Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, Boeing Defense, and General Dynamics combined account for 21.1%.