Secretive Defense Company Finds Missing Combat Robot

Washington, D.C., 2026-05-01—The secretive defense company Autonomous Battlefield Systems, Inc. announced that a prototype combat robot, missing for over a year, has been located.

"We've been working on a combat robot since 2017," said George Chapman, CEO of Autonomous Battlefield Systems. "Only in the last few years, with the advent of AI, have we been able to make significant progress, and in 2024, we built a prototype humanoid battle robot."

Chapman said the company tried to make its robot as human-looking as possible so it could blend in well with human fighters and give mixed robot-human fighting units a sense of camaraderie and cohesion.

"We built a couple of prototypes," said Chapman, "and we were getting really close. Unfortunately, we never quite managed to clear the uncanny valley between humans and robots, so our robots did have this weird dead-eyed look—sort of a cross between a rattlesnake and a psychopath. They also still acted extremely awkwardly in social situations and people who interacted with them reported high levels of unease."

As if these problems weren't enough, in mid 2024, one of the prototypes went missing. "We have no idea how it happened," said Chapman. "We reviewed the video footage and saw the robot making its way out of the facility, bold as brass, shooting out the security cameras as it passed."

But there's good news for Autonomous Battlefield Systems. The AWOL robot has been found. "Now all we need to do," said Chapman, "is to convince Donald Trump to return ABS-KILLER-1 to us, or actually, as Trump refers to it, Stephen Miller."