Foundation Future Robotics, an Eric Trump-backed robotics company, became the first company to deploy humanoid robots to a combat zone when it sent its Phantom MK 1 robots to Ukraine in February.
Now in talks to ship more MK 1 units to Israel, expanding its war theater footprint, Foundation co-founder Mike LeBlanc sees a near-future in which the majority of war fighting is done by robots.
“In the next five to 10 years, I would expect that humanoids, ground vehicles, drones, will be doing most of the major fighting, with humans really only doing special forces, special operations, small surgical operations on the side,” LeBlanc, a former Marine Corps officer with three tours of duty in the Middle East, told Digital in an exclusive interview.
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LeBlanc stressed that, while robotics companies have been creating both warfare drones and household humanoid robots, Foundation is the first company to create humanoid robots specifically for warfare.
The MK 1 units deployed to Ukraine have a roughly 88-pound carrying capacity, making their best fit in combat situations one of a supplementary role, assisting human soldiers with ordnance, munitions loading, manual labor and other ancillary tasks.
However, LeBlanc explained that the units were simply a “proof of concept” for the broader application of humanoid robots in war, claiming that Foundation is already close to shipping out the MK 2.
“It is 6 feet tall, 185 pounds, as I say, created in my own image,” LeBlanc joked.
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“But this thing is ready to engage by making small and medium machine guns, by engaging with enemies,” he added.
“The Mark II is going to be the biggest, fastest, strongest humanoid on the market. This robot is already able to pick me up. So it’s a much larger payload than anybody else. That allows us to do heavy industrial work, but it also lets us set up heavy machine guns, bullfrogs, etc.,” LeBlanc told Digital.
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LeBlanc said that Ukraine will likely be the first place the MK 2 is deployed, a fitting testing ground, he explained, as the war between Ukraine and Russia is largely fought by machines already.
“In Ukraine, robots are very much a question of today and today’s battlefield,” LeBlanc explained.
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He then marveled at how quickly the combat environment has shifted, contrasting today’s battlefield with the ones he engaged in during his tours of duty.
“It’s amazing how quickly things change. I was in Afghanistan in 2012, and then again in 2013. And at that time, they would have very small drones that it was almost like you were looking through a toilet paper roll,” he told Digital.
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“It was a very small supplementary tool. Today, when you go to Ukraine, it’s actually drones first that are doing the fighting and the humans that are the small supplement,” he said.
Still, LeBlanc did not see a future in which humans would become obsolete to warfare.
“I don’t think you’ll ever see a battlefield where you have no humans,” he said.
“I was just in New York at a fancy restaurant, and you know, even there, the waiter had to come by because our table was unbalanced, and he put some napkins in the bottom to make sure that it didn’t wobble,” he said. “We are a species of workarounds, and that’s what has made humans so incredible is that we can adapt to just about any situation. And so I think that it’s unlikely that we’ll see a battlefield without any humans, but we should drastically see that number drop.”
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The Foundation founder did address concerns that his robots could incur public fears about a “Terminator” situation.
“I think that anyone who’s been far away from the battlefield could get rightfully very concerned that we have Terminator going out and deciding who to kill and who not to kill,” he said.
But ultimately, he argued that anybody who has served on the front lines was going to be in favor of taking human beings out of harm’s way.
“We had a saying in the Marine Corps: never send a Marine where you could send a bullet first. And at Foundation, we always say, don’t send a Marine where you can send a humanoid first,” LeBlanc quipped.
An additional fear he’s had to grapple with is the public’s increased trepidation about artificial intelligence, a technology that served as the catalyst for his company’s breakthrough.
“The AI is what really brings humanoids alive,” he told Digital.
“I think there are rightfully a lot of concerns about AI and what AI companies are doing. Because, in some way, it’s kind of the digital nuclear program. So you are seeing all of these companies that are kind of able to engage in their own atom bomb, in a way. And so, especially companies like ours that are willfully putting these in combat and pressing to get these into combat, certainly should be questioned. But we’ve been having a lot of oversight,” he said.
LeBlanc foresees even further scrutiny when Democrats take control of Congress in January, with one prominent Democrat already highlighting Foundation’s relationship with investor and chief strategy officer Eric Trump.
“Senator [Elizabeth] Warren has called out our company by name because we have Eric Trump as a strategic advisor, he was an investor first, and now he helps us mostly with planning our real estate, our building of manufacturing facilities, and he just loves to talk about mechanical things,” LeBlanc said.
After Foundation secured a $24 million Pentagon contract for research into humanoid robots, Warren criticized the deal in a post on X.
“Eric Trump went on FOX to brag about winning ANOTHER multimillion-dollar contract from the Trump administration. I’ve been sounding the alarm and pushing for answers. Is the Pentagon just a cash machine for Trump’s kids now? This looks like corruption in plain sight,” she wrote.
LeBlanc pushed back on the criticism.
“She has called us out on, you know, ‘do the Trumps think that the Pentagon is their own personal ATM.’ For me, this just kind of goes against all of the facts and experience that I have in it,” LeBlanc said.
Sen. Warren did not immediately respond to Digital’s request for comment.