Foundation Phantom

The $24 million total spans research contracts with the US Army, Navy, and Air Force. One component, an Air Force SBIR award valued at approximately $1.8 million, was inherited through Foundation’s acquisition of Boardwalk rather than awarded directly to Foundation, per The Next Web’s April 2026 reporting.

The SBIR Phase III pathway allows a federally funded technology to move from research and development into commercialization without additional competitive procurement barriers. The designation qualifies Foundation as an approved military vendor, a status distinct from the company’s existing industrial lease model. Contract duration reported as two years by Semafor.

TIME described Eric Trump as an investor and newly appointed chief strategic adviser to Foundation by March 2026, shortly before the Pentagon contract disclosure. Congressional oversight attention to the contract was documented by Democracy Now and other outlets in April 2026. The political context does not alter the SBIR classification or the technical scope of the contracts.

Pentagon testing confirmed as concurrent with the two Phantom MK1 units deployed to Ukraine in February 2026. The Semafor and Next Web April 2026 reporting framed the contract announcement and Ukraine deployment as connected elements of the same military testing program.

Two Phantom MK1 units transferred to Ukraine in February 2026. Tasks included logistics runs and reconnaissance sweeps in hazardous forward areas. The deployment was described by multiple outlets as the first known instance of a humanoid robot tested on the front lines of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Testing in Ukraine surfaced four hardware constraints reported by Militarnyi (May 2026): (1) payload capacity limited to approximately 20 kg, insufficient for many logistics loads; (2) no waterproofing, restricting wet-environment and outdoor rainfall operation; (3) battery runtime of approximately 2-3 hours, requiring coordinated charge scheduling in field conditions; (4) approximately 20 motors requiring simultaneous reliable function, creating failure-surface concerns in sustained deployment.

Human operators retained active teleoperator authority throughout the Ukraine trials. Foundation’s stated philosophy keeps a human in the loop for lethal decisions. VR headset and supervised remote control modes confirmed as active in deployment, consistent with the Level II classification cap under the Autonomy Ladder framework.

Foundation CEO Sankaet Pathak described an upgraded Phantom 2 with approximately double the payload capacity as planned for 2026 deployment, addressing the payload constraint identified in Ukraine. No specific delivery date was confirmed.

Foundation disclosed proprietary cycloidal (rolling contact) gearboxes as the Phantom MK1’s primary differentiator. The company claims 90-95% energy efficiency and improved torque density versus harmonic drive alternatives, targeting approximately 20 kg payload capacity with compliance suited for human-proximate operation. No third-party verification of these figures was available at announcement.

Eight cameras, no LiDAR. Foundation framed the camera-only approach as a deliberate reliability decision for harsh industrial environments, pairing it with a hybrid AI stack combining imitation learning with physics-based state models and large language model reasoning layers.

175 cm height, approximately 80 kg. Titanium rod frame. Designed to fit existing assembly line geometries built around human workers, reducing facility retrofit requirements. Initial units required tethered power; battery-powered variants were planned but not shipped at reveal.

Hybrid system combining LLM reasoning with a Deep Variational Bayes Filter locomotion controller and reinforcement learning gait generation. VR teleoperation and supervised remote control retained as primary intervention modes for tasks outside the robot’s autonomous operating domain.