The move capped a chaotic five days at the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company.

Geschke was an Adobe founder who helped develop fundamental ways of creating, sharing and printing digital documents.

While much has been made of tech’s unwillingness to work with the Pentagon, startups are still plumbing the industry’s ties to the military.

SAN CLEMENTE, Calif. — Over the rolling, scrub-spotted hills of the Southern California coast, where defense contractors once tested rockets and lasers for President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program, what looked like a big, mechanical insect stalked a white pickup truck. Half a mile away, 28-year-old Palmer Luckey, one of the tech industry’s proudest iconoclasts, talked excitedly about the military potential of the flying machine — a self-piloting drone, called Ghost, that his startup company Anduril built.

“You can just set it up and then go do something else while it maneuvers,” he said.