A Humanoid Company Backed by Eric Trump Is Preparing Its Robots for War

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.

Humanoids have advanced in recent years, thanks to cheaper and more efficient motors, sensors, and other hardware, as well as AI algorithms that train these systems to perform certain kinds of dynamic moves like parkour and kung fu. But perception and navigation are key problems when humanoids are placed in unfamiliar situations. Although they can demonstrate remarkable balance, they often need specialized training for different terrain. And physical manipulation—which would be crucial for robots to perform many routine tasks, including picking up a gun—remains a major unsolved challenge.

Rodney Brooks, a robotics pioneer and professor emeritus at MIT, says he expects it to take more than a decade for humanoids to operate reliably in complex and unfamiliar settings. Even in the lab, a combat humanoid would need to be able to traverse a wide range of terrains and building types, navigate rubble on stairs, and get through doors that are blocked. And after that, “going from a solid lab demo to initial deployment in robotics is always at least 10 years,” Brooks says.

Deploying new kinds of military autonomy also raises all sorts of ethical questions around reliability and a lack of human input in decisions about the use of deadly force. The notion of placing humanoid robots in combat, is, simply put, a little terrifying, conjuring sci-fi images of The Terminator.

Pathak is dismissive. “From my perspective, the whole doomsday scenarios are very, very overblown for humanoids,” he says.

He also doesn’t seem worried about efficacy and believes robots and other tech could make war more precise and efficient. “I wish I could end wars, but I don't think I can,” he says. “But I can definitely contribute in making war more precise, reducing collateral damage as much as possible.”

That might be a way off. Pathak says that the next version of the company’s humanoid, Phantom MK2, will be the first version of the robot to be both waterproof and dustproof.