The list of people who should be trusted to develop killer robots is extremely short—likely, no one—and it certainly does not include Eric Trump, the President’s third-favorite son out of three. And yet, here we are. According to a new report from Wired, the Eric Trump-backed Foundation Future Industries (FFI) is in the process of developing a humanoid robot meant for the battlefield. Lord help us all.
FFI has been working on getting robots onto the frontlines for a couple of years now. Notably, it has reportedly deployed some of its humanoid robots (which it calls Phantom MK-1) in Ukraine to participate in the conflict. The company claims the bots have been used for logistics, including doing potentially dangerous tasks like performing supply pickups in potentially dangerous areas, per CNBC.
But FFI execs apparently have their eyes on putting weapons in those robotic hands. FFI’s CEO Sankaet Pathak told Wired they’re planning on unveiling something related to arming its bots with lethal force “in the next couple of months.” That comes after an interview with Euronews earlier this year in which Pathak said he expects to test out the weaponization of the bots in Ukraine as early as next year.
It’s not just the Ukrainian military that is interested in seeing how the tests go: FFI has already scored $24 million in contracts with the United States Department of Defense. While those government deals aren’t for lethal uses—instead, they’re focused on inspection, logistics, and weapons handling across several branches of the government—that seems to be the only thing that the company really wants to talk about.
FFI has been on something of a media tour promoting its plan to develop killer robots, which doesn’t seem like the thing you should just be able to talk about in public without getting tarred and feathered, but here we are. Pathak told Fox News, “You cannot build a utopia and then not defend it. That just doesn’t make any sense,” and claimed, “There are a lot of people who want to destroy what exists in America.” Presumably, in his dream world, those people would be the targets of armed, autonomous robots designed to kill. Sounds like utopia, right?
Whatever the worst vision is that you conjure when imagining a private company building death machines for the government, Pathak is not very good at dispelling it. “I think we have this psychological reaction, which is like the Terminator, but the reality is if you really think about it from a practical sense, it’s not really like that,” he told Euronews. “It’s essentially like, why would you send a bunch of humanoids if your goal is to be able to wreak havoc?”
Instead, he sees his robots as an option for complex and sensitive military missions. You can see how saying the bots are more precise killing machines is not particularly comforting, right? Because he seemingly cannot.
Beyond the whole autonomous killing machine thing, there is also the Eric Trump of it all, who is busy extending the corruption of the Trump family while his father is in the White House. His involvement with FFI was enough to draw scrutiny from Democratic members of the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, which estimated that the Trump sons have invested in or taken roles at companies that have collectively landed more than $725 million in loans, grants, and awards since Trump reassumed the office of the President.
The Washington Post recently highlighted how the Trump sons have been focused heavily on defense technology companies, and have an even more stunning figure to highlight just how much self-dealing seems to be happening in this space: it totaled $3.2 billion in direct government business done with companies since the kids kicked some money into them, and an additional $3.1 billion in contract options with the federal government.
So yes, the Trump family is brazenly siphoning taxpayer money directly into their own pockets. But at least the killer robots that some of that money is being used to develop will probably give us all a swift and painless death as they “wreak havoc.” That’s something.