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The original was posted on /r/singularity by /u/Wonderful-Excuse4922 on 2026-03-18 12:03:48+00:00.
This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/singularity by /u/Anen-o-me on 2026-03-16 01:11:04+00:00.
See them soon in Ukraine...
AN FRANCISCO — The Phantom MK-1 looks the part of an AI soldier. Encased in jet black steel with a tinted glass visor, it conjures a visceral dread far beyond what may be evoked by your typical humanoid robot. And on this late February morning, it brandishes assorted high-powered weaponry: a revolver, pistol, shotgun, and replica of an M-16 rifle.
“We think there’s a moral imperative to put these robots into war instead of soldiers,” says Mike LeBlanc, a 14-year Marine Corps veteran with multiple tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, who is a co-founder of Foundation, the company that makes Phantom. He says the aim is for the robot to wield “any kind of weapon that a human can.”
Today, Phantom is being tested in factories and dockyards from Atlanta to Singapore. But its headline claim is to be the world’s first humanoid robot specifically developed for defense applications. Foundation already has research contracts worth a combined $24 million with the U.S. Army, Navy, and Air Force, including what’s known as an SBIR Phase 3, effectively making it an approved military vendor. It’s also due to begin tests with the Marine Corps “methods of entry” course, training Phantoms to put explosives on doors to help troops breach sites more safely.
In February, two Phantoms were sent to Ukraine—initially for frontline-reconnaissance support. But Foundation is also preparing Phantoms for potential deployment in combat scenarios for the Pentagon, which “continues to explore the development of militarized humanoid prototypes designed to operate alongside war fighters in complex, high-risk environments,” says a spokesman. LeBlanc says the company is also in “very close contact” with the Department of Homeland Security about possible patrol functions for Phantom along the U.S. southern border.
In just a few short years, the rapid proliferation of AI has turned what was once the stuff of dystopian sci-fi into a reality. LeBlanc argues humanoid soldiers are a natural extension of existing autonomous systems like drones. Compared with risking the lives of teenage grunts, with all the political backlash and risks of stress-induced war crimes and trauma, humanoid soldiers offer a more resilient alternative, with greater restraint and precision. Robots do not suffer from fatigue or fear and can operate continuously in extreme conditions while immune from radiation, chemicals, or biological agents. Moreover, LeBlanc believes that giant armies of humanoid robots will eventually nullify each side’s tactical advantage in any conflict much like nuclear deterrents—exponentially decreasing escalation risks.
The counterargument is, however, chilling: that humanoid soldiers lower political and ethical barriers to initiating conflict, blur responsibility for any abuses, and further dehumanize warfare. Current Pentagon protocols decree automated systems can engage only with a human green light, and Foundation insists that is also its intention for Phantom. However, AI-powered drones in Ukraine are already assessing targets and autonomously firing as Russian radio jamming renders remote operation ineffective. If an adversary decides to allow the autonomous operation of AI-powered soldiers, what’s to stop the U.S. and its allies from reciprocating in the fog of war?
“It’s a slippery slope,” says Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis for the Washington-based think tank Defense Priorities. “The appeal of automating things and having humans out of the loop is extremely high. The lack of transparency between the two sides of any conflict creates additional concerns.”
Moreover, set against a drastic militarization of American society—with heavily armed ICE officers swarming U.S. cities, the National Guard deployed to six states last year, and local police equipped with armored vehicles left over from the Forever Wars—the specter of AI-powered soldiers with opaque mission directives and chains of command has civil-liberty alarm bells clanging. Then add in the well-documented algorithmic biases that are known to blight AI facial-recognition software. Yet in a sign of stripped-away guardrails for AI’s national-security implementation, on Feb. 28 President Donald Trump ordered federal agencies and military contractors to cease business with Anthropic, known as the most safety-conscious of the big AI firms. Anthropic’s contract decreed its technology couldn’t be used to surveil American citizens or program autonomous weapons to kill without human involvement. While both these restrictions chime with current government protocol, the White House refused to be bound by them.
And the U.S. is far from alone in exploring humanoid soldiers. Authoritarian regimes including Russia and China are developing the dual-use technology, pitting the West in a contest to create ever more powerful and efficient killing machines in human form. A humanoid-soldier arms race is “already happening,” says Sankaet Pathak, Foundation co-founder and CEO.
Modern warfare is already hugely automated, from smart mines and antirocket defense shields to laser-guided missiles. The question is how much autonomy is too much. As companies like Foundation race to embody humanoids with lethal functionality, a parallel legal tussle is raging between AI-focused defense companies and international bodies seeking to codify what level of human control is appropriate in war. Lethal autonomous weapon systems are “politically unacceptable” and “morally repugnant,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said last year, in remarks that seem to put the international order on a collision course with AI-focused defense firms with influential backing. TIME can reveal that Eric Trump is an investor and newly appointed chief strategic adviser at Foundation.
“Autonomy is a spectrum,” says Bonnie Docherty, a lecturer at the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School. “Technology is moving rapidly towards full autonomy. And there are serious concerns when life-and-death decisions are delegated to a machine.”
In Ukraine, where Vladimir Putin’s war of choice has just entered its fifth year at a cost of some 350,000 lives and counting, that spectrum of autonomy has been stretched to new limits. For LeBlanc, who undertook over 300 combat missions for the Marines, what he discovered upon taking Phantom to Ukraine was “really shocking,” he says. “It’s a complete robot war, where the robot is the primary fighter and the humans are in support. It is the exact opposite of when I was in -Afghanistan: the humans were everything, and we had supplementary tools.”
Ukraine, which now launches up to 9,000 drones every day, has become the world’s premier testing ground for arms manufacturers—including Western startups—seeking to automate parts of the conventional “kill chain,” the step-by-step process used to identify, engage, and destroy an enemy target. These firms include Foundation, which wants to get Phantoms onto the front line of combat to hone the technology via a “feedback loop” of real-life use cases.
“Just like drones, machine guns, or any technology, you first have to get them into the hands of customers,” says Pathak.
Increasingly, every aspect of the Ukraine war is being automated. Most stunning has been the proliferation of autonomous drones, which boast software that can navigate payloads over hundreds of miles and lock onto a target. AI-enhanced Ukrainian quadcopters can attack Russian soldiers without humans in the loop when communications fail and remote control becomes impossible. Computer vision can identify and eliminate specific targets, even flying through windows to assassinate individuals. In late January, three bloodied Russian soldiers emerged from a routed building to surrender to an armed Ukrainian ground robot, a kind of small, unmanned tank.
LeBlanc says what he saw in Ukraine only bolsters his belief in the value of humanoid soldiers. On the front lines, troops are burrowed down in stronghold positions but acutely vulnerable to drone attacks every time they venture outside. So humanoid soldiers could be invaluable for resupplying and reconnaissance work, especially in places that drones can’t access, like low bunkers. With a heat signature like that of humans, robots like Phantom may also throw off enemy surveillance. Moreover, having humanoid soldiers means existing stocks of weaponry can be deployed in their cold metal grip rather than being rendered obsolete by robots that require purpose-built tools of their own.
“How many .50-[caliber guns] do we have? How many grenade launchers? How many humvees?” asks LeBlanc. “We need something that can interact with all of these. So having a humanoid really unlocks the entire U.S. military.”
Ultimately, wars are won by breaking the enemy’s will. It can leave in body bags or as morale drains away. But even as strikes aimed at the latter, like the Russian energy-infrastructure attacks that have left Ukrainians without heat, can be considered a war crime, LeBlanc argues that such moves are preferable to firebombing a human population—and that they’ll be all that’s left when humans leave the field of war. “Droid battles, with a bunch of drones overhead and humanoids walking out towards each other, becomes an economic conflict,” he says. “I think that’s all for the better.”
There are downsides. Humanoid robots are heavy and expensive, need regular recharging, and are ...
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