Foundation Future Industries, a 2024-founded humanoid robotics startup that counts Eric Trump as its chief strategy adviser and an investor, plans to give its Phantom robots lethal capabilities within months. CEO Sankaet Pathak told WIRED the company is exploring weapons systems and expects to unveil something in the next couple of months. The company already holds government contracts and says its Phantom MK1 has been tested with Ukrainian forces on the battlefield.
The pitch is narrower than most humanoid startups, which chase warehouse, hospitality, or household work. Foundation is targeting the US military directly, aiming its bipedal machines at reconnaissance, logistics, inspection, and eventually combat. Pathak declined to detail the kinetic payload, but the timeline he offered is aggressive: a weaponized reveal within roughly 60 days.
The financial picture is smaller than the public messaging suggests. During an April 23 Fox Business segment, Eric Trump was credited with a $24 million Pentagon contract. When WIRED pressed for details, Foundation shared five contracts — two inherited from Boardwalk Robotics, which it acquired shortly after founding, and three routed through the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, a Florida nonprofit. The company does not appear to have independently won new federal work under its own name.
Key facts
- 01Foundation Future Industries plans to add weapons systems to its Phantom humanoid within the next couple of months, CEO Sankaet Pathak told WIRED.
- 02Eric Trump is both an investor and chief strategy adviser, and touted a $24 million Pentagon contract during an April 23 Fox Business interview.
- 03Foundation was founded in 2024 and acquired Boardwalk Robotics, tied to Florida's Institute for Human and Machine Cognition.
- 04Foundation says its Phantom MK1 has been tested with Ukrainian forces; Phantom MK2 will be waterproof and dustproof.
- 05MIT's Rodney Brooks says humanoids need more than a decade to operate reliably, with at least 10 years from lab demo to deployment.
Eric Trump's public role is unusually forward for a strategy adviser. On Fox Business he said the robots fist-bump, high-five, and follow commands, and that autonomous AI will reshape industry, military application, and hospitality. Pathak described the president's son as an engineer at heart who does milling work at home. The political proximity is part of the company's go-to-market — few US humanoid startups are pitching armed systems at all, let alone with a Trump family member fronting the message.
The Pentagon's interest in humanoids is not new. DARPA ran humanoid contests from 2012 to 2015, and the Army now funds militarized humanoid work through a program called xTechHumanoids. The war in Ukraine has accelerated procurement of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems across aerial drones, small vessels, and ground vehicles, and legged platforms are the next logical extension for terrain that wheels cannot handle.
One roboticist familiar with Foundation, speaking anonymously, said the military use case is where the economics work because that first entry through a door is where soldiers still die. The roboticist pointed to Fallujah in the First Gulf War, where several thousand insurgents were dispersed across 10,000 buildings and US troops cleared them one at a time. The argument for a robot doing that job writes itself.
The counterweight is technical. Robert Griffin, a senior research scientist at IHMC who advised Boardwalk, said it is difficult to disentangle the current state of the art from the potential state of the art in humanoids, and that building an actual human soldier spans the whole gamut of robotics. Perception, navigation on rubble and stairs, and physical manipulation — including reliably picking up a weapon — remain unsolved at deployment quality. Rodney Brooks, an MIT professor emeritus, expects it to take more than a decade for humanoids to operate reliably in complex unfamiliar settings.
“going from a solid lab demo to initial deployment in robotics is always at least 10 years.”— Rodney Brooks, MIT professor emeritus
Foundation's near-term hardware confirms how early this stage is. Pathak said Phantom MK2 will be the first version of the robot to be both waterproof and dustproof — table-stakes ruggedization for any field-deployable defense system, and a reminder of how far from combat-ready the platform is today. The company's own roadmap places basic environmental sealing in the next version, not the current one.
Autonomous lethal force also raises the harder question of who pulls the trigger. Pathak dismissed doomsday framing as overblown and argued the technology can make war more precise and reduce collateral damage. That is the standard defense-tech thesis, and it will be tested against export controls, rules-of-engagement policy, and Congressional appetite for autonomous kill decisions long before Phantom sees a real deployment.
Foundation is a small bet on a large idea: that the humanoid form factor, backed by political access and a defense-first go-to-market, can leapfrog the warehouse-first playbook that Figure, Agility, and Boston Dynamics are running. The near-term revenue is modest and the technical gap is a decade wide by Brooks' math. But the strategic positioning — an American humanoid company explicitly building for the Pentagon, with a Trump on the cap table — is a category of one, and it will draw both defense dollars and the regulatory scrutiny that comes with them.
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