Eric Trump-Backed Humanoid Company Prepares Its Robots for War

Some companies want it Their humanoid robots fold your clothes. Some want them at work. Sankaet Pathak and his startup Foundation Future Industries have a slightly different goal: to create an American robotics giant.

Pathak, the Foundation’s CEO, says his company plans to start giving humanoids lethal powers soon, though he declined to share details. “We have some things we’re looking into,” he tells WIRED. (He means weapons.) “Maybe we’ll reveal something in the next few months,” he adds. Besides fighting, the company says its robots can be useful in tasks, detection, and surveillance.

The US military has long been interested in humanoids. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded major humanoid trials between 2012 and 2015, and the Army has a program called xTechHumanoids that manages the development of technologies related to “humanoid military capabilities.” Militaries around the world are actively researching and adopting new autonomous or autonomous systems, including aerial drones, small ships, and small vehicles. Legs can traverse the most difficult terrain, and the hope is that humanoids will be able to perform many of the tasks once performed by human soldiers. The war in Ukraine has served as a laboratory for developing and testing many of these systems; The Foundation has reportedly tested its humanoid, the Phantom MK1, with the Ukrainian military.

It is unique in targeting the military market, and so far it has been profitable. The company has multimillion-dollar government contracts and high-profile supporters to spread its message: Eric Trump, the president’s son, is both an investor and the company’s top adviser. “People don’t realize that he’s an engineer at heart, so he does a lot of milling and stuff like that at his house,” says Pathak.

In an interview with Fox Business on April 23, Trump boasted about the company’s bots. “When you go up and interact with these robots, they punch you, they lift you up, they follow your commands,” he said. “You bring AI autonomy, it’s going to change industry, it’s going to change military operations, it’s going to change hospitality. The applications are limitless, and I think that’s a very beautiful thing.”

The foundation was established in 2024. A few months later, he found a company called Boardwalk Robotics, which worked with the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), a non-profit research organization in Florida known for its work on humanoid robots.

During Mr. Trump’s segment on Fox, the host found a “$24 million contract with the Pentagon” that the company won, although this seems dubious: when WIRED asked for more information about the Foundation’s contracts, the company shared information about two that it received from Boardwalk and three that came through IHMC. The company doesn’t seem to have gotten itself any new dough from the government.

However, some people believe that it is the best place. “When you wear a military hat, it makes sense, because that’s where soldiers still die—the first step in the door,” says a roboticist familiar with the Foundation, who asked not to be identified so as not to damage business relationships. “If you look at Fallujah, the first Gulf War, you had several thousand terrorists hiding in 10,000 houses and (US troops) just going door to door.”

“I think it’s so close to potential that I’m surprised it hasn’t been written about yet,” he adds.

Like other humanoid companies, however, the Foundation often shows its robots operating autonomously—and some experts say autonomous soldiers are a distant dream.

“Right now, it’s hard to separate the technology from the technology’s potential” with humanoids, says Robert Griffin, a senior research scientist working on robotics at IHMC who led one project involving Boardwalk and was the company’s technical advisor. “There’s a lot of complexity, that goes into the whole range of robotics, in terms of building a real soldier,” says Griffin.