Semper Gumby

Anthony Mansfield (MS 2023, MDR 2024) is hard to pin down.

He’s a U.S. Marine Corps veteran with six years in light armored reconnaissance under his belt.

In his day job, Mansfield works for Anduril Industries, the Costa Mesa defense tech company.

Last April, he was appointed to the Irvine Planning Commission, which decides land-use, zoning, and development issues for the city of more than 300,000.

At 34, Mansfield is also a cancer survivor.

He holds two USC master’s degrees — in criminal justice and dispute resolution — and has mediated more than 100 cases in Los Angeles Superior Court.

In a side gig, he’s a research consultant with Arbitrus.ai, a startup that bills itself as the first AI-powered private court.

To the untrained eye, Mansfield’s path looks nonlinear or unconventional. But there’s a through-line: he improvises, adapts to new realities, and overcomes whatever challenges present themselves.

Marines have a term for it: “Semper Gumby.” Always flexible.

Orange County Nomad

Born in Santa Ana, Mansfield was raised by a single mom holding down a full-time administrative job and caring for two kids. Frequent moves, including periods in public housing, shuttled the family around Orange County.

In his teens, Mansfield was a loner and an indifferent student. His one interest was football. The gridiron at Rancho Alamitos High School gave the 6-foot-tall, 220-lb lineman his first taste of camaraderie and teamwork.

After graduating in 2010, he tried a semester at Golden West College, but it didn’t click. “I didn’t know what I wanted, and I didn’t like education,” he says. For the next four years, Mansfield worked odd jobs, sometimes couch-surfing, sometimes drifting back home. “I was a nomad,” he recalls. “I was lost.”

The global war on terror was at full-throttle, and friends were enlisting. An uncle was a retired military man. In 2014, Mansfield signed up with the Marines, craving adventure with the mindset of “doing the hardest job possible.”

Stationed at Camp Pendleton, he rose to fire team leader, accountable for more than $8 million in vehicles, weapons and optics. Though Mansfield never got to deploy overseas, those six years in the Marines instilled “a real work ethic, a sense of order, discipline and structure,” he says.

He cultivated industrious habits, banking his active-duty paychecks and saving up his GI Bill education benefits. He started taking GE courses on the side at Orange Coast College (OCC) in preparation for a still-hazy future.

Learning to Love to Learn

At OCC, Mansfield transformed into an academic standout and campus leader. He joined the College Republicans and found a political home in free speech advocacy. He was elected student senate president and made connections in the broader California Republican Party infrastructure. In 2020, having separated from the Marines, he transferred to UC Irvine (UCI) on a merit-based academic scholarship. “It was incredibly vindicating as someone who’d grown up with really bad grades,” he says.

He majored in criminology, law, and society, preparing himself for a possible career with a three-letter federal agency. He became active in student government as an advocate for veterans, served as a student senator, and chaired the UCI College Republicans. “That’s where the real seeds of dispute resolution were planted in me,” he says, “brokering deals among competing interest groups.”

His criminology studies whet Mansfield’s appetite for more, so in 2022 he enrolled in the master’s program in criminal justice through USC’s Bovard College. “It was really cool,” he recalls. “It was as if I’d almost never left the military. I joined a veterans’ fraternity. I lived in veterans’ housing. And I’m wearing the USC hoodie.”

He fell hard for the football games, the band, and the Trojan Network. With another year of GI Bill benefits available to him, Mansfield applied to USC Gould’s Master of Dispute Resolution degree program. Courses in contact drafting, arbitration advocacy and cross-cultural facilitation paired nicely with ADR experiences through the Mediation Clinic. He built a real-world portfolio of small claims cases alongside 2L and 3L students at the Center for Dispute Resolution under center director Richard Peterson and clinical instructor Michael Karagozian.

Embracing the Unknown

That experience fueled Mansfield’s desire to become an attorney. In fall 2024, he drove cross country to begin a JD program at Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Florida, where he’d been offered admission on a generous military scholarship. A month in, however, he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

Crushed, he withdrew and drove back to California for treatment.

He managed to beat the cancer after six rounds of chemotherapy. Navigating the VA benefits system, Mansfield notes, put his dispute resolution training to the test. To keep his mind occupied while he battled his disease, Mansfield educated himself about artificial intelligence models and software development. He began consulting for Arbitrus, an AI-powered arbitration and private court platform.

Mansfield had been a day-one investor in the company, co-founded by his friend Kimo Gandall in 2023. The two had bonded as College Republican leaders at UCI, before Gandall went on to build his startup while earning a JD from Harvard Law School. Launched in 2025, Arbitrus is an automated end-to-end dispute resolution system that can evaluate contracts, handle case filings, run discovery, cross-examine witnesses and issue binding decisions using specialized AI models and agents — all at a tenth of the traditional cost, according to developer Fortuna Arbitration.

Mansfield believes that within the decade AI will play a significantly increasing role in contract and insurance claims

Putting It Together

Mansfield isn’t afraid of emerging technologies.

Lately, his AI connections in legal arbitration have drawn Mansfield into the defense tech space, where he’s met interesting people in the Air Force and at companies like Palantir, Raytheon, Boeing and Lockheed Martin. In May, he started a full-time job with Anduril Industries. Mansfield won’t discuss his classified work in the defense contractor’s operations division, but he will say this: “Anduril has been the best company to work for. They love veterans, and they’re very patriotic.”

Networking has also given Mansfield an entrée into local politics. Last spring, Irvine vice mayor James Mai — a mentor from Mansfield’s years in College Republican leadership — appointed him to the city’s Planning Commission. Since taking his seat in April, Mansfield has moved along several major housing proposals and developed a “public-benefit ratio” system to quantify how much a proposed development actually gives back to the community.

Irvine is a master-planned city, and Mansfield’s role as a commissioner lets him tap into a background packed with Marine planning and operations experience, while flexing his dispute resolution muscles.

“I get to put in practice everything I learned at USC Gould,” he says. “From zoning fights to HOA disputes, I can bring win-wins.”

Tips for Trojans

His advice to fellow USC Gould students: stay curious and don’t be a carbon copy. “Find positive ways to make yourself stick out among your peers.”

Another tip: expect to get knocked down. “Most of my life, I had to pick myself up, dust myself off, and get back to work.”

As he continues to curate his distinctly bespoke career, Mansfield is looking down the road. He can imagine himself in Congress someday — admittedly an uphill climb, “but a little can-do attitude mixed with a little luck will carry you far,” he says.

Wherever ambition takes him, Mansfield’s heart belongs in California.

“I love this state, especially Orange County, and I have an even deeper love of Irvine,” he says. “I go to sleep at night, and it’s peaceful and quiet here. I take a lot of pride in knowing that I have a hand in it, and that I get to help develop and advance the city.”