The official charged with overseeing the Department of Homeland Security’s artificial intelligence operations and massive surveillance dragnet came to the job from Anduril Industries, a powerful military AI contractor that could benefit from the reconnaissance build-out his office is overseeing, according to an ethics disclosure reviewed by the Lever.
The official joined the Department of Homeland Security while the agency was led by Kristi Noem, who was just fired amid allegations of self-dealing.
The Department of Homeland Security appointed Antoine McCord in March 2025 as the agency’s chief information officer and chief artificial intelligence officer. McCord also leads the Office of Biometric Identity Management, a Homeland Security operation that oversees hundreds of millions of biometric records like fingerprints and face scans of immigrants and citizens alike.
The disclosure revealing McCord’s work for the company was made public on Thursday by ProPublica, part of a trove of thousands of ethics documents from the Trump administration obtained and published by the news organization. McCord’s work at Anduril has not previously been reported.
The biometrics office has been a focus of the Trump administration as it attempts to build out a biometric surveillance dragnet under Customs and Border Protection, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security. The most recent plans for the program would require border agents to scan the faces of all immigrants and visitors entering or leaving the United States.
Anduril is already swimming in taxpayer funding; within six months of McCord leaving the company, it received a $363 million expansion of the vast network of surveillance towers and sensors along the southern border that it operates. The company is considered a likely beneficiary of Homeland Security’s expanded biometrics program, given its border surveillance work.
While Anduril’s border-security tech has traditionally not…
Auteur: Katya Schwenk
