Foundation Future Industries sent me a cease-and-desist after I reported on the company’s claims about Department of War funding and humanoid robot deployments in Ukraine.
I was trying to confirm reports that the San Francisco-based startup had secured $24 million in Pentagon contracts, as outlets like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, NBC News, and the Washington Post have reported. Since defense contracts are a matter of public record, the $24 million claim should be easy to verify. There are certainly confidential military programs with undisclosed funding, but Foundation wouldn’t be talking about it on Fox News if that was the case.
Foundation sent me a Cease & Desist after I reported on the company’s claims about Department of War funding and humanoid robot deployments in Ukraine. I was trying to confirm reports that the San Francisco-based startup had secured $24 million in Pentagon contracts, as outlets like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, NBC News, and the Washington Post have reported. Since defense contracts are a matter of public record, the $24 million claim should be easy to verify. But I could only find around $3 million in Pentagon awards that Foundation inherited when it acquired Boardwalk Robotics, a spin out of Florida’s Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), in 2024. I asked ChatGPT to find more info and it referenced a 2026 pitch deck by Foundation with even bigger claims about military contracts. The deck was hosted on a dedicated Foundation domain that was discoverable through organic search. Foundation’s law firm, Blank Rome, identified the pitch deck as Foundation’s in its Cease and Desist letter. The company’s claims about military funding remain unconfirmed.
— Mike Kalil (@mikekalilmfg) October 4, 2026
Using federal databases, I could only find around $3 million in awards that Foundation inherited when it acquired Boardwalk Robotics, a spinout of Florida’s Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC), in 2024. Though Foundation has shown its flagship humanoid, the Phantom MK1, doing little more than logistics work since it emerged from stealth in early 2025, the company has differentiated itself with its eagerness to deploy its machines onto the battlefield.
I asked ChatGPT to find more info and it referenced a 2026 pitch deck by Foundation, titled “Humanoids for War,” with even bigger claims about military contracts as well as its activities in Ukraine. The deck was hosted on a dedicated Foundation domain that was discoverable on Google and Bing. Anyone doing research on Foundation via organic search or LLMs had access to the deck’s contents because the company made no apparent attempt to secure it.
The parts that jumped out at me were Foundation’s even bigger claims about its military funding and its work in Ukraine. Instead of $24 million, the company now claims more than $73 million in military funding. The figure is presented unambiguously at first, but the deck later broadens the bucket to include historical funding from institutions that contributed to the humanoid platform it acquired from Boardwalk.
Foundation now appears to be treating the $24 million as a claim it never made. That’s hard to square with the record. The number was stated on Fox Business while Pathak and chief strategy adviser Eric Trump were sitting there, and then-host Maria Bartiromo said it was to train Foundation’s Phantom MK1 humanoids alongside US Marines.
On X, Pathak shifted the claim from a Foundation contract to years of work on a platform the 2-year-old company did not build, saying “the platform has done over $70M in real work across our prime and subcontractor relationships over the years.” The “platform” work he is pointing to runs through IHMC, a nonprofit that developed the humanoids Nadia and Alex. In August 2025, the Office of Naval Research awarded IHMC a contract with a potential value of $24.8 million for Squadbot V3, a humanoid for urban outdoor operations. That award is to IHMC, not Foundation.
The deck also repeated claims about Phantom humanoids testing in Ukraine that have not been independently verified. Bartiromo reported on Fox in February 2026 that Foundation had secured a “US-brokered” deal to deploy the humanoids in Ukraine. Journalist Craig S. Smith said he flew to Kyiv expecting to see the humanoids delivered but they got stopped at the Poland border and never arrived. He spent months trying to confirm a battlefield test and could not. The Ukraine deployment remains a company claim, contradicted by the one reporter who traveled to meet the machines.
Anyway, I’ve removed screenshots and verbatim passages that I used as references after Craig Weiner, an attorney from Blank Rome, sent me a C&D threatening legal action and saying they filed DMCA takedown notices with YouTube, X, LinkedIn, and SiteGround, my hosting provider. The letter claimed that the representations revealed company “trade secrets.” The imagery was sci-fi CGI. The funding and Ukraine claims were already on television, in the press, and a website that the company left open to search engines and chatbots.