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: producing an all-American super soldier robot.

Pathak, the Foundation’s chief executive, says his company plans to begin equipping its humanoids with lethal capabilities soon, although he declined to share details. “We have some kinetic things we’re exploring,” he tells WIRED. (Refers to weapons systems). “We will probably reveal something in the coming months,” he adds. In addition to 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 competitions between 2012 and 2015, and the Army has a program called xTechHumanoids that funds the development of technologies relevant to “militarized humanoid capabilities.” Armies around the world are rapidly exploring and adopting new autonomous or semi-autonomous systems, including aerial drones, small boats, and compact vehicles. Legged systems can traverse more challenging terrain, and the hope is that humanoids can take on many tasks now performed by human soldiers. The war in Ukraine has served as a laboratory for the development and testing of many of these systems; The Foundation says it has tested its humanoid, Phantom MK1, with Ukrainian forces.

It is unique in its targeting of the military market and has been lucrative so far. 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 strategic advisor. “People don’t realize that he’s actually an engineer at heart, so he does a lot of milling and stuff like that at home,” Pathak says.

During an interview with Fox Business on April 23, Trump bragged about the company’s bots. “When you go up and interact with these robots, they fist bump you, give you high fives, and follow your orders,” he said. “If you bring in the autonomy of AI, it will change industry, it will change military application, it will change hospitality. The uses are limitless and I think it’s a very beautiful thing.”

The 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 with humanoid robots.

During Trump’s segment on Fox, the host touted a “$24 million Pentagon contract” won by the company, though that seems a little confusing: When WIRED asked for more information about the Foundation contracts, the company shared details of two that had been inherited from Boardwalk and three that came through IHMC. The company does not appear to have raised new government funding independently.

Still, some people believe it’s a promising niche. “If you put on a military hat, it makes a lot of sense, because that’s where soldiers still die: the first entrance through a door,” says a roboticist familiar with the Foundation, who asked to remain anonymous so as not to affect business relations. “If you look at Fallujah, the first Gulf War, there were several thousand insurgents hiding in 10,000 buildings and [US troops] just going door to door.”

“I think it’s so feasible that I’m surprised they haven’t presented it yet,” they add.

However, like other humanoid companies, Foundation often portrays its robots as performing tasks autonomously, and other experts say that fully autonomous robot soldiers are a distant dream at best.

“Right now, it’s difficult to separate the current state of the art from the potential state of the art” with humanoids, says Robert Griffin, a senior research scientist working on robotics at IHMC, who led a project involving Boardwalk and was a technical advisor to the company. “There are many challenges, spanning the entire spectrum of robotics, to the idea of ​​building a real human soldier,” Griffin says.