Some companies want their humanoid robots to fold your clothes. Others want them in the workplace. Sankaet Pathak and his startup Foundation Future Industries have a slightly different goal: produce an all-American robot supersoldier.
Pathak, Foundation’s CEO, says his company plans to start giving its humanoids lethal capabilities soon, although he declined to share specifics. “We have some kinetic things we’re exploring,” he tells WIRED. (He means weapons systems.) “We’ll probably unveil something in the next couple of months,” he adds. Besides combat, the company says its robots could be useful for logistics, reconnaissance, and inspection.
The US military has a long-standing interest in humanoids. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded major humanoid contests between 2012 and 2015, and the Army has a program called xTechHumanoids that bankrolls the development of technologies relevant for “militarized humanoid capabilities.” Militaries around the world are rapidly exploring and adopting new autonomous or semiautonomous systems, including aerial drones, small vessels, and compact vehicles. Legged systems can traverse more challenging terrain, and the hope is that humanoids could take on many tasks now done by human soldiers. The war in Ukraine has served as a laboratory for the development and testing of many of these systems; Foundation says it has tested its humanoid, Phantom MK1, with Ukrainian forces.
It’s unique in its targeting of the military market, and so far it’s been lucrative. The company has government contracts worth millions of dollars and high-profile backers to spread its message: Eric Trump, the president’s son, is both an investor and the company’s chief strategy adviser. “People don’t realize he actually is an engineer at heart, so he does a lot of milling and things like that at his home,” Pathak says.
During an interview with Fox Business on April 23, Trump bragged about the company’s bots. “When you go up and you interact with these robots, and they fist-bump you, they high-five you, they follow your commands,” he said. “You bring in AI autonomy, it’s going to change industry, going to change military application, it’s going to change hospitality. The uses are unlimited, and I think it’s a very beautiful thing.”
Foundation was founded in 2024. A few months later, it acquired a company called Boardwalk Robotics, which worked closely with the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), a nonprofit research institute in Florida known for its work on humanoid robots.
During Trump’s segment on Fox, the host touted a “$24 million contract with the Pentagon” won by the company, though that appears to be a bit fuzzy: When WIRED asked for more information about Foundation’s contracts, the company shared details of two that had been inherited from Boardwalk and three that came through IHMC. The company doesn’t appear to have independently secured new dough from the government.
Still, some people believe it’s a promising niche. “If you put a military hat on, it makes a lot of sense, because it’s where soldiers still die—that first entry through a door,” says one roboticist familiar with Foundation, who asked to remain anonymous so as not to affect business relationships. “If you look at Fallujah, the first Gulf War, you had several thousand insurgents hiding in 10,000 buildings and [US troops] just going door to door.”
“I think it is so close to feasible that I’m surprised they’re not already fielded,” they add.
Like other humanoid companies, however, Foundation often portrays its robots performing tasks autonomously—and other experts say fully autonomous robot soldiers are a distant dream at best.
“Right now, it is difficult to disentangle the current state of the art from the potential of the state of the art” with humanoids, says Robert Griffin, a senior research scientist working on robotics at IHMC who led one project that involved Boardwalk and was a technical adviser to the company. “There’s a bunch of challenges, spanning the whole gamut of robotics, for the idea of building an actual human soldier,” Griffin says.
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