Foundation Future Industries, a start-up founded in 2024 and reportedly valued north of $1 billion, is building humanoid robots in America to automate factory work, construct futuristic mega-cities, and wage future wars. The company faces opposition from the Catholic Church and the United Nations, with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres calling for international law to ban “killer robots.” Co-founder Sankaet Pathak told The Independent that such concerns are misguided, arguing that humanoid robots could make war more precise, cause less civilian deaths, and save human soldiers’ lives. He noted that U.S. adversaries like China and Russia are pursuing military humanoids and four-legged robot “dogs” with weapons, so America needs to match them. Pathak said defense work is only a “small portion” of what Foundation does, but he criticized Western opposition, stating, “It is so backwards that people in the Western world somehow have this disease of thinking that humanoid robots holding a gun is like as bad as a nuclear weapon.” The San Francisco-based company claims it is the only U.S. or European firm explicitly building humanoid robots for defense, while many top robotics companies signed an open letter in 2022 committing not to “weaponize” their creations. AI firm Anthropic was blacklisted by the Pentagon for seeking assurances its systems wouldn’t be part of autonomous weapons using lethal force without human input.