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The word came first, as a sales pitch. Bruce Bethke says he coined "cyberpunk" in 1980 as the title of a short story, to sell it to an editor. It ran in Amazing Stories in November 1983. The editor Gardner Dozois picked the word up and used it for a whole new wave of writers.

The book that defined it was William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984). Gibson had already coined the word "cyberspace" in his 1982 story "Burning Chrome". Neuromancer became the first novel to win the science fiction "triple crown": the Hugo, the Nebula and the Philip K. Dick Award.

The look came from real places. Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong was a single block of buildings that grew into a maze of towers, wires and alleys, packed with homes, clinics and factories. Designers of cyberpunk films and games have been redrawing it ever since it was demolished.

Anduril Industries is a defense technology company in Costa Mesa, California, co-founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, who earlier founded the VR headset company Oculus. The name is Andúril, the sword Aragorn carries in The Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien's Elvish it means "Flame of the West."

What it actually makes, by its own description and the reporting:

• Lattice, its software, which pulls feeds from many sensors into one live 3D picture and runs across its hardware.
• Fury, an uncrewed fighter-style jet built for the US Air Force's "collaborative combat aircraft" program. The Air Force named it YFQ-44A, and it first flew on October 31, 2025.
• Anvil, an interceptor built to knock enemy drones out of the sky.
• Arsenal-1, a giant factory in Pickaway County, Ohio, announced in January 2025 as a roughly $1 billion investment.

In June 2025 it raised $2.5 billion at a $30.5 billion valuation. The company says its mission is to give the US and its allies better defense technology, faster.

CRISPR is a gene-editing tool adapted from the way bacteria fight off viruses. It can cut DNA at a chosen spot. Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for turning it into a tool anyone with a lab could use.

There are two very different ways to use it on people:

• Somatic editing changes cells in one patient's body, like their blood. The changes aren't passed on to their kids. Approved CRISPR treatments already exist.
• Germline editing changes an embryo, egg or sperm. Every cell of the future person carries the change, and so do their children. That's the "super baby" idea, and it's the line most of the world won't cross.

In the US, Congress has blocked the FDA from even reviewing applications for clinical trials that edit embryos meant to become pregnancies, through a rider renewed in its budget since 2015. Many other countries ban it outright.

Cyberpunk always had the augmented animal: the cyber-dog, the engineered guard beast. In October 2026 one got a pitch deck. A startup called Warhound came out of stealth with $200 million at a reported $1.2 billion valuation, to build gene-edited, cloned working dogs for the military, police and first responders. The dogs don't exist yet.

The idea came out of conversations between Ben Lamm, CEO of Colossal Biosciences, the "dire wolf" company, and Palmer Luckey of Anduril, according to Defense News. Its chief executive is David Spirk, who previously held a senior role at Palantir. Reported investors include Sequoia, 8VC and In-Q-Tel, the venture firm backed by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies.

The plan, as the company describes it:

• Biobank cells from top-performing Belgian Malinois and German Shepherds.
• Clone them through Viagen, a Colossal-owned cloning company, and edit the embryos.
• Health first: the team points to inherited problems in working dogs, like hip dysplasia, poor eyesight and cancer risk. Lamm also floated speed, agility and a better nose for bombs.
• Timeline: first puppies expected in early 2027, working dogs in about two years.

So where's Anduril? Not in the DNA. Lamm told TechCrunch Anduril would supply gear like vests, goggles and software for situational awareness: "on top of the dog, not in the dog." He also said Luckey is a partner in the venture but owns no equity in it. Colossal owns equity in Warhound and licenses it the technology.