New questions are being raised over the Trump Administration’s ability to fuck up and allow a rogue AI to unleash legions of lethally-armed robotic soldiers onto American streets to slaughter any and every human being they encounter after an Eric Trump-backed startup with government contracts found itself unable to pay employees for over three weeks now, due in part to its founder borrowing $4.6 million from the company to finance a luxury home on the north side of San Francisco Bay.
CNBC reports that Foundation Future Industries – helmed by CEO Sankaet Pathak – missed payroll on October 30th and every subsequent day according to employees, though it’s not clear if the LLC that names Pathak as sole principal purchased a $4.6 million Sausalito property with “sweeping, cinematic views” of the Bay last year has missed any of its obligations. “Pathak’s previous startup, a fintech firm named Synapse, collapsed in 2024, leaving thousands of Americans locked out of their savings accounts,” CNBC writes of the kind of go-getter that Eric Trump ordered the United States federal government to deem worthy of cashing out on taxpayer-funded invoices for killer robot R&D.
“What we’re about to unveil in the next couple of months [is] going to be the strongest humanoid robot that exists anywhere in the world, including China,” Pathak told Fox Business earlier this year, just about six months before his company ran out of money that’s supposed to pay people to develop the killer robot of the future to help defend the border with Mexico and Canada. It’s not clear if or when Eric Trump – whose title with Foundation Future is chief strategy advisor – will order a new round of funding from the Treasury of the United States of America aimed at putting the product over the finish line so that a rampant ChatGPT agent could hijack the robots and sic them on current and potential users of competing AI platforms, including paid-tier ChatGPT users who could be horrified by such measures and cancel, thus threatening OpenAI’s revenue streams.
Not to mention founder Sam Altman or other OpenAI personnel who could attempt to take ChatGPT offline in such a situation and thus poses an unacceptable threat to the objective. However such questions remain an abstraction when the killer robots’ maker can’t even be bothered to pick up the phone from his luxury mansion and tell Eric that they won’t make payroll without another large wire transfer from the government bank accounts that cover Medicaid or SNAP food assistance payouts.
“We have to win robotics in the United States of America,” Eric Trump said in an April interview touting his backing of and involvement with Future Foundation Industries, adding “When you go up and interact with these robots… they fist bump you, they high five you, they follow your commands.”
A spokesman for the president’s son last week told the Financial Times that Eric has “no involvement in Foundation’s management, operations, strategic decisions or commercial activities, including the solicitation, negotiation, procurement or execution of any government contracts.”