A San Francisco robotics startup with ties to the Trump family has quietly deployed two humanoid robots to Ukraine’s active war zone — what the company describes as the first known deployment of humanoid robots in a combat theater in history. The robots are not pulling triggers. Not yet. But their maker, Foundation Future Industries, has made its ambitions unmistakably clear: within 18 months, it intends to put its machines on the front lines alongside U.S. forces, backed by $24 million in Pentagon contracts and a mission it frames as nothing less than saving human lives at humanity’s most dangerous places.
From Fintech to the Front Line
Foundation Future Industries was founded in 2024 by Sankaet Pathak, best known for previously leading Synapse, a fintech platform that declared bankruptcy that same year. Pathak launched Foundation alongside Arjun Sethi, former CEO of Tribe Capital, and Mike LeBlanc, a Marine Corps veteran and co-founder of Cobalt Robotics. The company’s core premise broke from the dominant direction of the humanoid robotics industry — rather than building machines to fold laundry or staff coffee counters, Foundation set its sights on the world’s most dangerous work environments, from heavy industrial sites to active combat zones.
“I’m convinced the technology is reaching a level where it can replace jobs that are dangerous for humans to perform, and if you can do that, it’s the highest net good you can create out of all applications of robotics,” Pathak told CNBC.
The company did not arrive without controversy. Foundation drew scrutiny after suggesting it had close ties to General Motors and could receive investment from the automaker — claims GM publicly rejected. Despite the early turbulence, Foundation pressed forward, and its ambitions would soon gain global attention.
The Ukraine Deployment
In February 2026, Foundation deployed two of its Phantom MK-1 humanoid robots to Ukraine for operational testing under combat conditions, marking one of the first instances of a humanoid robotic system being evaluated on an active battlefield. The deployment, backed by the U.S. government and conducted in coordination with Ukrainian officials, focused on logistics operations in hazardous areas — specifically the kind of supply pickups that routinely expose soldiers to enemy fire.
The Phantom MK-1 is a bipedal humanoid standing 5 feet 11 inches tall and weighing approximately 176 pounds. The system walks at 1.7 meters per second, carries a 44-pound payload, runs on eight cameras with no bulky LiDAR, and uses proprietary cycloidal actuators delivering up to 160 newton-meters of torque. Its AI stack translates high-level task instructions into motion through a large language model pipeline, with operators retaining final authority over lethal decisions.
Ukraine was a logical testing ground. Now in its fifth year, the war against Russia has evolved into one of the most technology-intensive conflicts in modern history, with autonomous ground robots delivering supplies to the front and AI-augmented drones conducting precision strikes and reconnaissance. Ukraine now launches thousands of drones per day, and earlier this year, footage emerged of Russian soldiers surrendering directly to an armed Ukrainian ground robot.
Limitations of the Current Model
For all of its symbolic weight, the MK-1 remains far from a battlefield-ready super soldier. The robot carries only a 44-pound payload, lacks waterproofing, and does not yet have sufficient battery life for deployment at scale. No official performance assessment from the Ukrainian field trials has been released, and testing remains ongoing as engineers collect operational data from the frontline environment.
Foundation has acknowledged those gaps and is already working to close them. The MK-2, expected this month, consolidates electronics to reduce short-circuit risk, adds waterproofing and larger battery packs, increases payload capacity to 175 pounds, and uses cast-molded bodywork to speed manufacturing and reduce costs. Pathak has described the upgraded model as delivering “superhuman abilities” over its predecessor, and the company intends to ship units to Ukraine once the MK-2 is available. Foundation’s production targets are 40 units in 2025, 10,000 in 2026, and 50,000 by the end of 2027.
The Ministry of Defense of Ukraine declined to comment on the matter. The U.S. Department of Defense did not respond to an inquiry.
Washington Alignment and the Trump Connection
Foundation’s ties to the current administration have become a defining — and contested — feature of the company’s profile. Eric Trump, the second son of President Donald Trump, recently joined the company as its chief strategy advisor. A Foundation spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that Eric Trump had been an investor in the firm prior to taking the advisory role, with both parties sharing a stated goal of returning manufacturing to the United States.
The arrangement drew immediate political fire. Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren alleged that the firm’s government contracts amounted to “corruption in plain sight.” Foundation has not backed away from its Washington alignment, instead leaning into it. The company has framed its mission explicitly around the geopolitical competition between the United States and China.
“The goal is to deliver the best robots we can build to the U.S. military — better than anything China has,” Pathak told CNBC.
The start-up has already secured government research contracts totaling $24 million for feasibility testing in inspection, logistics, and weapons handling across the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Pathak said conversations with defense officials have moved past the research phase into discussions about how to scale deployment. Beyond Ukraine, the platform is reportedly being considered for potential use along the U.S. southern border and is expected to undergo obstacle-course evaluations with the U.S. Marine Corps, which would assess mobility and operational tasks including support functions during entry operations.
The Regulatory and Ethical Frontier
As humanoid robots approach combat deployment, they are running headlong into a framework of military ethics and international law that was not designed to accommodate them. The Pentagon’s Directive 3000.09, updated in 2023, specifies that “autonomous and semi-autonomous weapon systems will be designed to allow commanders and operators to exercise appropriate levels of human judgment over the use of force.” Foundation has stated that its robots comply with that standard — human operators retain final authority over lethal decisions. But Pathak has also acknowledged that in certain time-critical scenarios, the robots will need to operate with full autonomy.
Senators have recently argued that Pentagon policy is not keeping pace with the technology, with Sen. Joni Ernst noting that AI-driven targeting is being integrated with autonomous munitions “at a pace that DoD Directive 3000.09 was not designed to contemplate.” The Pentagon’s Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering agreed that the policy “absolutely needs updating.”
Internationally, the UN General Assembly First Committee adopted a resolution in November 2025 with 156 states in favor and five against, calling for negotiations on autonomous weapons. The Group of Governmental Experts on lethal autonomous weapons systems has sessions scheduled for 2026 and is expected to submit a final report to the Convention on Conventional Weapons in November — the last year of its mandate, making 2026 a critical year for any international regulation. The United States was among the small minority of states that voted against the resolution.
Expert Skepticism — and Consensus
Defense analysts are divided on whether a human-shaped robot is the right form factor for war. Kateryna Bondar, a senior fellow with the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told CNBC that humanoid robots could offer real tactical advantages in modern urban combat. “Modern urban combat spaces — where there are stairwells, ladders, basements and narrow corridors — were created for human movement, which could give humanoid systems an advantage over tracked or quadruped robots in certain scenarios,” Bondar said.
Others are more skeptical. “Making robots look like humans is a complex and expensive engineering challenge, and what Ukraine has taught us is the opposite — that we need the ability to adapt rapidly and manufacture quickly and cheaply,” said Melanie Sisson, a senior fellow with the Brookings Foreign Policy program. The military robotics that are actually proven in use in Ukraine are wheeled, tracked, or quadruped — simple, cheap, and expendable. A bipedal humanoid that costs $150,000 and can fall on rough terrain is none of those things.
Still, there is growing consensus that the broader shift toward autonomous machines in warfare is already underway and accelerating. “I expect tracked, flying and underwater robots to replace human forces,” said Toby Walsh, chief scientist at the University of New South Wales’s AI Institute. Whether a humanoid form factor proves practical or not, Foundation Future Industries has already crossed a threshold no company had crossed before — putting a robot that walks like a soldier into a war that is very much still being fought.