Philly weaponized robotics firm is in hiding
Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics Corporation has concealed its new headquarters since January, following a sustained local human rights campaign against the firm's work with the Israeli military.
Roughly four months after the announcement of their acquisition by a South Korean weapons manufacturer, the Philadelphia-based Ghost Robotics Corporation published a highly stylized video depicting its Vision 60 four-legged robot quickly killing two armed combatants with a SigSauer assault rifle equipped through a Colorado-produced AimLock gimbal, using a TruSense S210 laser to determine the distance to its targets and NVIDIA’s Jetson Orin platform to power the necessary computation.
Filmed by the veteran-owned production company TacGas, the “CONOP” video resurfaced earlier this month as part of the Tampa-based special operations conference SOF Week, which Ghost jointly attended with the Fort Bragg-adjacent special operations contractor Raven Advisory. Despite Ghost’s public attendance of the conference, the company has largely been in hiding since their late-January exit from their former headquarters at the Pennovation Center of The University of Pennsylvania, which a student newspaper attributed to months of local protests against the company. Since the departure, the company has locked down both its press email and social media account on X, as well as purposefuly withheld public disclosure of their new Philadelphia address, which was said to have significantly more square footage.
Despite Ghost Robotics having a global military footprint, the public address for the company’s work with the U.S. federal government has remained a single unit of an apartment in the Allegheny West neighborhood of Philadelphia. (The Pennovation Center address is still listed on Ghost’s LinkedIn profile.)
While Ghost Robotics did not respond to repeated requests for comment, the Pennovation Center provided a curt response by email that “We do not have any information on Ghost Robotics.” An Allied Universal security guard for the front gate to the facility similarly told the author that the Pennovation Center had no forwarding address for Ghost, which the author confirmed through mailing a certified request for comment to Ghost by way of their former address, only to have the package returned to sender.
Security guards posted to Ghost’s former address of 150 Rouse Blvd. in the Navy Yard near the Lincoln Financial Field similarly confirmed that the robotics company had left “years ago,” and that the building no longer had a forwarding address for Ghost.
Much of the controversy surrounding Ghost Robotics has stemmed from the company’s partnership with the Israeli military, which has been widely estimated to have killed more than 17,000 Gazan children since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. Beyond Ghost having previously publicly promoted its partnership with the Israeli weapons manufacturer Rafael, the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported early last year on the Israel Defense Forces purchasing at least four of Ghost’s Vision 60 robots — the same model at the center of the company’s stylized lethal concept video — in relation to a partnership with the Israeli robotics company Robotican.
The U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division received widespread press coverage for publicly experimenting with equipping an assault rifle to Ghost’s Vision 60 robots in August of last year, albeit with a M16 rifle and a mount produced by the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, rather than a SigSauer attached through the AimLock system.
(Ghost has competition from the Hangzhou-based Unitree Robotics, whose Go1 and Go2 competitors to the Vision 60 have not only been experimented with by China’s People’s Liberation Army, they have also been procured multiple times in recent years by the U.S. Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command, with the Marine Corps further reportedly using the Go1 model for its public experiment in September 2023 with attaching an M72 anti-armor rocket launcher to a “robotic goat.”)
Just two weeks prior to the 10th Mountain demonstration of the M16-equipped Vision 60, the website Philly Anti-Capitalist published a first-hand account of a vandalization on July 9, 2024 of the Fairmount townhome of Ghost Robotics CEO Gavin Kenneally, spray-painting “MURDERER” vertically in white down his front door and “GHOST ROBOTICS KILLS” in red across his garage. Just one day after the vandalization of Kenneally’s townhome, a similar incident occurred at the company’s then-headquarters at the Pennovation Center, which the online news site Technical.ly reported to have led to a police inquiry.
Despite the Philadelphia robotics company remaining tight-lipped about its new headquarters, Ghost will likely be required to publicly disclose their new address through their annual report to the Pennsylvania Secretary of State by the end of next month. Local campaigners are certain to be keeping watch, as the local community movement ‘Shut Down Ghost Robotics’ responded to Ghost’s January exit from the Pennovation Center by posting on Instagram that “We want them to know that they are NOT be welcome ANYWHERE in Philadelphia,” adding that “We will keep organizing and fighting for a world where weapons and companies like Ghost are obsolete.”
That’s an impressive urban assault goat. I can only imagine that this equipment will be used to clear civilians as the great land grab proceeds.