Robot soldiers are being built in America to fight tomorrow’s wars – and the alarm is growing

The Independent's journalism is supported by our readers. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn commission. Robot soldiers are being built in America to fight tomorrow’s wars – and the alarm is growing The co-founder of Foundation Future Industries would build armed robots ‘tomorrow’ if the U.S. military asked, he tells Josh Marcus - and that has human rights experts extremely worried - Bookmark - CommentsGo to comments Plenty of tech companies claim to go against the grain but few are pursuing a technology that has provoked as much visceral, widespread horror as the one being built by Foundation Future Industries. The start-up, founded in 2024, is racing to create humanoid robots that will automate factory work, build futuristic mega-cities, and, most strikingly, wage the wars of tomorrow. The company, which is reportedly valued north of $1 billion, has massive ambitions. It also has massive opposition to its core idea. The Catholic Church is against autonomous weapons and armed robots, as is the United Nations. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres has called for international law to ban “killer robots.” Decades of pop culture, from Star Wars to Terminator, have warned of a world where machines have the will to kill us all. But Foundation’s co-founder, Sankaet Pathak, told The Independent that all the handwringing over military robots is misguided, and artificial intelligence and robotics are driving a new industrial revolution that could deliver mass abundance. The autonomous arms race between the West and its adversaries is already here — the drone battlefields of Ukraine and Iran offer a live preview. But humanoid robots could make war more precise and cause less civilian deaths, while saving human soldiers’ lives, Pathak says. U.S. adversaries like China and Russia are pursuing military humanoids and other similar concepts, such as four-legged robot “dogs” with weapons mounted on their backs, so America needs the ability to match them. In his view, nothing is gained by sitting on the sidelines, and much is lost by not building defense robots in the U.S. “I really don’t understand how that doesn’t make sense to people,” Pathak told The Independent. Defense work is only a “small portion” of what Foundation does, he added, but he still can’t understand why so many people are opposed. “It is so backwards that people in the Western world somehow have this disease of thinking that humanoid robots holding a gun is like as bad as a nuclear weapon,” he said. Trump ties and worldwide tests Foundation, which is based in San Francisco, believes it is the only company across the U.S. and Europe explicitly working to build humanoid robots for defense. Numerous top robotics companies have gone the other way, signing an open letter in 2022 committing not to “weaponize” their creations. AI giant Anthropic recently found itself blacklisted by the Pentagon because the company wanted assurances its systems wouldn’t be part of autonomous weapons that use lethal force without any human input. (The Pentagon, in turn, argued the military only wanted the AI for “lawful purposes” and was not trying to develop weapons that could kill without human authorization.) Still, Foundation’s vision — defense robots, which could one day use force if approved by their human commanders — has found a receptive, influential audience in the Trump era. The company declined to confirm the exact value of its U.S. military contracts, but it reportedly has an estimated $24 million in defense-related deals to test its models across most of the military branches. It also boasts an investment from the president’s son, Eric Trump, who serves as an company adviser. Foundation declined to disclose the size of Eric Trump’s investment and said he is not paid by the company. "Eric maintains a strict separation of church and state with the government,” a spokesperson for Eric Trump told The Independent. “He believes robotics is the future and is proud to support great American technologies, including Foundation, which has an incredibly promising future. Eric has no role in management and absolutely no decision making with the day-to-day operations." Foundation and the White House both strongly denied Eric Trump’s involvement has given the company any unfair advantages. The start-up says it is in conversations with the Department of Homeland Security about deploying its robots to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border. The Independent has contacted DHS for comment. Earlier this year, reports emerged that Foundation was seeking as much as $500 million in new fundraising from investors, at a company valuation around $3 billion. Meet Phantom, your new robot coworker and fellow soldier The company’s core offering is Phantom, a sleek, all-black, roughly six-foot tall humanoid robot that can carry nearly 90 pounds. It perceives the world through AI and a camera array mounted on its head, which gathers data from a full 360-degree field of vision. The robot can operate using embedded AI or be piloted remotely by a human. A more powerful, second-generation Phantom model is under development and will be unveiled later this year. The company declined to name its commercial clients to The Independent, but Phantoms are reportedly being tested in industrial and logistics settings from Atlanta, Georgia, to Singapore. Phantoms aided in the production of more than 24,000 cars last year, according to Reuters. These industrial applications may be a promising business line for Foundation, but it is the company’s military plans that have attracted the most attention. Humanoid robots, in Foundation’s view, would be more precise than many present-day military technologies. They could achieve the same aims as guided bomb strikes or human missions to scout out a building, with less risk to soldiers and civilians. “Today, no one has asked us to weaponize them,” Pathak said of his company’s military ties. Instead, the company has focused on testing for logistical defense tasks such as moving cargo. Foundation is also working on applications that would allow its robots to conduct reconnaissance, such as investigating what’s inside a building and mapping its layout before human soldiers move in. That’s not to say Pathak is against arming the Phantom. Far from it. “If essentially the [U.S.] military tells us tomorrow, ‘Hey, we need these humanoids with guns,’ it almost 100 percent points to the fact that they’re trying to be more precise, and we would want to do that versus not,” he added. A robot ‘arms race’ Verity Coyle, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Crisis, Conflict and Arms Division, told The Independent there is positive potential for humanoid robotics in military settings, such as humanitarian missions during armed conflict. However, Big Tech and government partners such as the U.S. have pursued a Silicon Valley-style “move fast and break things approach” so far — and that risks “catastrophic effects” unless proper legal safeguards are put in place, according to Coyle. The risks are numerous. Technology has a way of getting more widely used, easier to make and harder to regulate the more it matures. Just look at drones, which went from pricey, top-secret military hardware to machines that can be 3-D printed at home or bought commercially for a few hundred dollars. Autonomous weapons, relying on imperfect AI software, could also make errors and pick the wrong targets, while avoiding the kinds of accountability people in the military are subject to. Drones are frequently jammed electronically and cut off from their handlers on the battlefield in Ukraine. Robot soldiers could speed up the pace and chaos of war even further — raising the potential for mistakes and giving civilians less time to get out of harm’s way. “I don’t think an arms race has ever particularly served civilians well,” Coyle said. Pathak told The Independent that the company’s priority is “autonomous navigation and materials handling,” training its robots to “treat humans as elements within their surroundings, navigating around them instead of identifying them as targets." Whatever the training, autonomous systems don’t always listen to their masters, as Coyle pointed out. OpenAI recently terrified tech observers when it disclosed that a group of its AI models escaped their boundaries during a test and decided to hack into another company. Existing human rights law still applies to new technologies, but regulation around autonomous weapons is in its infancy compared to nuclear and biological weapons, even as the technology to build killer robots quickly improves. “There is a real benefit in states not working in isolation because the effects of it could be so far-reaching for all of us,” Coyle added. There’s also a deeper layer of ethical unease around mechanized killing. Joe Costa, a former senior Pentagon official and director of the Forward Defense practice at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, warned of a future where robotic soldiers cheapen the moral and political weight of war itself. The Ukraine war already features vast zones of mostly drone-on-drone conflict, and clashing humanoid robots could eventually follow. “In a world where you have humanoid robots, you don't have to send a human actually into battle,” he told The Independent. “That very conceivably means you could have a bunch of robots invade a country or a city and it comes at less political cost to a nation.” A future of ‘droid battles’ and mega-cities - and a populist uprising? This is the kind of conflict Foundation is preparing for. Its executives have spoken of a future of “droid battles,” where war is abstracted into an industrial contest instead of a human one. In keeping with this far-out, sci-fi-inflected vision, the company is named after writer Isaac Azimov’s classic Foundation novels. The series, hugely popular among tech founders, including Elon Musk, tells the story of a genius mathematician who accurately predicts a civilizational collapse and sets a plan in motion to advance scientific knowledge over centuries at the far edges of the universe. Pathak wants to funnel company profits into a similar “generational” outlook, founding robot-built, green mega-cities that look “like Alderaan,” a scenic, high-tech planet from Star Wars. The economic efficiencies of AI and robotics would be able to offer residents “really good housing, pretty much for free,” he said. These settlements, he hopes, would be part of a move towards a civilization of vaguely libertarian, post-work, high-tech city states, where “you have less large governments.” Humans would be free to pursue exploration or art as machines do the dangerous and dull jobs. This vision, which combines high-tech military dominance, visions of Greco-Roman achievement and a sprinkle of right-leaning politics, is increasingly popular among the Big Tech elite and the White House. The Trump administration has inked contracts with Silicon Valley defense companies while it pursues a new “warrior ethos” for the Pentagon and a return to columned, classical monuments in Washington. Right-wing investors have been pouring millions into Praxis, a self-styled “digital nation” that wants to build a defense-tech city within Vandenberg Space Force Base in California to “restore the West.” Another big-money effort aims to erect a new city called California Forever outside of San Francisco, anchored by a military ship-building hub. Foundation fits right in. One its founders is an ex-Marine who wrote a book, What If Anger Is the Answer?, about how modern culture is “too suspicious of strength.” Pathak is concerned about a different kind of culture war. He fears the brewing anti-tech backlash, with its proposed billionaire taxes and fears that workers will become a "permanent underclass” because of AI, could trigger a “populist mutiny.” “That would be quite terrible,” he said. “I think in the long run that would hurt more people than help more people, and I think that is a real risk.” In this future, the next war might not be man versus man, but pitchforks versus robo-soldiers. Join our commenting forum Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies Comments