Day: October 6, 2025

• FieldAI recently raised $405 million from industry giants including Gates, Bezos, Nvidia, Intel.
• AI has gotten much better at digital tasks, but struggles in the physical world.
• FieldAI robots perform relatively simple jobs, while collecting fresh data, and build from there.

In a recent South Park episode, Randy Marsh urges his daughter to learn hands-on skills because AI will automate many knowledge-based jobs.

“AI can do everything better than we can, except for stuff that requires arms,” he says.

It’s funny, but also true. AI models are getting really good at digital skills such as coding. Beyond bits, though — in the physical world — AI is nowhere near matching the ability of humans to perform many different tasks.

A big reason for this yawning capability gap is data. In the digital world, the internet provides a readymade mountain of information that machines can learn from. In the world of atoms, there’s no equivalent.

This physical-world data mountain must be built from scratch. It’s a herculean task. I recently met an unassuming startup founder who’s hacking away at this problem in an interesting way.

Data without physical assets

Ali Agha spent seven years at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, developing autonomous multi-robot systems for exploring different environments, including Mars. He started FieldAI in early 2023 and has a team of robotics and AI experts from companies including Google, DeepMind, Waymo, Tesla, Nvidia, Boston Dynamics, and Amazon.

In the race to amass all this physical world data, some big tech companies have a natural advantage. Tesla has huge vehicle and battery factories. Amazon runs hundreds of massive warehouses. Foxconn assembles millions of iPhones and servers in gigantic plants. If you don’t have such assets, you have to get more practical and inventive. And this is exactly what FieldAI has done.

Its AI models are designed to get many different types of robots out into real-world situations as quickly and safely as possible. Once there, they perform relatively simple but valuable tasks. While doing this, these machines constantly collect new data, which is fed back into the startup’s AI models, which helps them improve. This, in turn, helps FieldAI release more robots into new situations, where, again, they gather even more data and learn all over again.

This is a contrast to some other AI robotics players, which are working on much more ambitious capabilities before getting their machines out in the wild.

“You’re deploying more, you’re getting more data, and that data makes the model better, which helps you deploy even more, and even more data is starting to be collected,” Agha told me in a recent interview. “This flywheel has started spinning faster and faster.”

Big investors

In the six months of 2025, FieldAI contracted 10 times more robots than in the first half of 2024. This is helping to drive that flywheel of real world data collection.

This has caught the eye of major investors. In August, FieldAI raised $405 million, one of the largest startup funding rounds this year. Backers include Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Vinod Khosla, Intel, Samsung, and Laurene Powell Jobs.

“Enabling autonomy solutions at scale is an extremely difficult problem, but the deep expertise of the FieldAI team and their unique approach to embodied intelligence reflects a pragmatic path forward,” said Khosla, who was one of the first investors in OpenAI.

The new money will pay for new hires and a major push to “productize” FieldAI’s novel approach, according to Agha. That means getting a heck of a lot more data-collecting robots out into the world.

The startup’s AI models are designed to control many different types of robots, from quadrupeds to humanoids, wheeled robots, and passenger-scale vehicles. The machines are already deployed in Japan, Europe, and the US, in industries including construction, energy, manufacturing, urban delivery, and inspection.

Agha took me through a practical example from the construction industry to show how FieldAI’s approach is working.

BIMs, robots, and ROI

Building Information Modeling, or BIM, is an established way to create a detailed digital copy of a construction project, so progress and issues can be tracked accurately.

Usually, BIMs are maintained and updated by human employees walking around construction sites, recording details manually by taking photos and writing notes.

Instead, FieldAI deploys robots to conduct these site tours and update BIMs automatically. This helps construction companies keep better track of the projects, and it’s more thorough and cheaper than hiring human workers to walk around for hours doing this task, according to Agha.

A key task is taking photos regularly so you can go back over time and see a project’s progress, or a lack of progress. Was the drywall put in before all the piping was finished? If there’s a disagreement between the contractor and the insurer, for instance, having an extremely detailed photographic record of the project over time is key.

A robot can walk around these huge sites non-stop, 24/7, while a human can’t, which makes these automated BIMs much more detailed and accurate, Agha noted.

As FieldAI machines tour these sites, they constantly collect new data, which gets fed back to improve the AI models that power the robots. Then, next time, the robots can add more tasks.

“A huge benefit of these platforms is that they compound future use cases,” Agha said. So one month, a FieldAI robot is taking site photos. The next month, it might also check that the safety barriers are in the correct place. The following month, it might add inventory tracking. There were 100 copper pipes on the second floor yesterday so why are there only 25 now?

The end result is that construction projects can be monitored more closely for less cost, increasing customers’ return on investment, according to Agha.

“The key for ROIs, is that the person who was previously walking six hours a day around these massive sites — this person now spends most of their time checking the incoming data from our robots and is analyzing where there’s progress and why these other things haven’t happened,” he said.

Recently, FieldAI had to pull one of these robots from a construction site, due to a paperwork issue. The project superintendent kept calling to ask when the robot was coming back, because they’d gotten so used to an automated system patrolling the site and reporting back so often, according to Agha.

“That was a signal for us,” he said. “It was a validation that helped to convince us that this is the right time to grow.”

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.

The home of South Carolina Circuit Court judge Diane Goodstein was set on fire after she had reportedly received death threats.

State law enforcement is investigating the house fire on Edisto Beach which began at around 11:30 a.m. E.T. on Saturday, sources told local news outlet FITSNews. Goodstein was reportedly not at home at the time of the fire, but at least three members of her family, including her husband, former Democratic state senator Arnold Goodstein, and their son, have been hospitalized with serious injuries. According to the St. Paul’s Fire District, which responded to the scene, the occupants had to be rescued via kayak. Law enforcement have not disclosed whether the fire is being investigated as an arson attack.

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“At this time, we do not know whether the fire was accidental or arson. Until that determination is made, [State Law Enforcement Division Chief Mark Keel] has alerted local law enforcement to provide extra patrols and security,” South Caroline Chief Justice John Kittredge told FITSNews, adding that the fire appeared to have been caused by an “explosion.”

The 69-year-old judge had received death threats in the weeks leading up to the fire, multiple sources told FITSNews. Last month, Goodstein had temporarily blocked the state’s election commission from releasing its voter files to the Department of Justice, a decision that was openly criticized by Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon and later reversed by the state Supreme Court. The DOJ had sought the information, including names, addresses, driver’s license numbers, and social security numbers, of over three million registered voters as part of President Donald Trump’s March executive order restricting non-citizens from registering to vote. (Non-citizens are already not allowed to vote in federal and state elections.)

The Trump Administration has sought to drastically reshape the election system in the name of election integrity, by requesting and in some cases suing states for voter registration data to compile a comprehensive centralized database from more than 30 states, including suing several of them, and considering pursuing criminal investigations into state election officials. Critics have argued that the Administration’s efforts are an attempt at disenfranchising voters from marginalized communities and overstepping states’ constitutional authority to control election procedures.

If the fire at the judge’s house turns out to be targeted, it may mark the latest incident of a startling rise in political violence in the U.S. And while the Trump Administration has blamed the left’s rhetoric for inspiring violence such as the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, an attack on a judge would come as the Administration has increasingly vilified the judiciary, blasting judges that rule against it as “U.S.A-hating” insurrectionists.

Political violence on the rise

In addition to Kirk’s murder last month, the murder of Democratic Speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives Melissa Hortman and her husband in June, and an arson attack at Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s residence in April, a number of judges who have ruled against Trump have also received attacks and threats from his supporters.

Chief Judge for the District of Rhode Island Jack McConnell told NPR in August that his court has received more than 400 threatening voicemails, including several credible death threats. McConnell had issued a ruling blocking Trump’s freeze on federal aid earlier this year. Judges told NPR that they have received unsolicited anonymous pizza deliveries, a tactic known as “pizza doxxing” that implies that the sender knows the judges’ addresses.

A White House spokesperson told NPR that attacks on public officials have “no place in our society,” noting the President’s own experience with assassination attempts last year.

“I’m hearing everywhere that judges are worried about their own safety. There are people who are inflamed by the incendiary comments of our president and members of Congress about judges. Public officials have legitimized attacks on judges with whom they disagree,” Nancy Gertner, a former judge and current professor of practice at Harvard, told the Guardian in May.

That month, Richard Durbin, top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, penned a letter to Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel requesting an investigation into “pizza doxxing” incidents against at least a dozen judges.

“Threats against judges are threats against constitutional government. Everyone should be taking this seriously,” New York Judge Richard Sullivan, a Trump first-term appointee, told the Associated Press in March.

“This is a basic authoritarian instinct,” Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University and coauthor of How Democracies Die, told the AP. “You cannot have a democracy where the elected government can do whatever it wants.”

Trump Administration’s targeting of judges

Less than a year into his second presidential term, Trump has asserted an expansive view of his executive powers. As of October, Trump has issued over 300 orders, proclamations, and memoranda, many of which have resulted in thorny and protracted legal battles. Between May 1 and June 23, federal district courts blocked Trump’s actions with temporary restraining orders or preliminary injunctions around 94% of the time, according to data analyzed by Adam Bonica, an associate professor of political science at Stanford University, while the Supreme Court reversed those orders in close to 94% of its cases. Critics have said that the sheer amount of litigation, some of which has been brought or appealed by the Trump Administration, could overwhelm the judiciary.

“What President Trump has done, perhaps more than other presidents, has been to not only bring the test cases and force the courts to deal with these issues, but to do it in a shock and awe strategy, which puts additional stress on the courts,” Steven Richman, Chair of the IBA Bar Issues Commission, told podcast Global Insight, speaking in a personal capacity. “Test cases are one thing, but as in any litigation involving parties and lawyers on both sides, the facts and positions taken must satisfy rules of professional ethics in terms of not being frivolous.”

Others have said the bigger threat comes from Trump officials attacking judges that rule against the Administration. Trump and his allies have also sought to portray the judiciary and their decisions as politicized and “judicial overreach.”

Hours before the fire at Goodstein’s house, Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller accused U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut of “legal insurrection” for granting a restraining order that blocks Trump’s deployment of the Oregon National Guard in Portland. California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, said in a post from his office that Miller’s accusation “for ruling on a case isn’t just reckless. It’s authoritarian propaganda, plain and simple.” (Miller has previously accused Democrats of using incendiary language to “mark people” for political violence.)

Trump has called specific judges who have pushed back on his executive orders “radical left lunatic” and “troublemaker and agitator.” In May, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called the panel of judges that ruled against Trump’s sweeping tariffs “activist judges.” In a post that month, Miller said, “We are living under a judicial tyranny.”

Miller posted on X in March, “Under the precedents now being established by radical rogue judges, a district court in Hawaii could enjoin troop movements in Iraq. Judges have no authority to administer the executive branch. Or to nullify the results of a national election.”

“Another day, another judge unilaterally deciding policy for the whole country. This time to benefit foreign gang members,” Republican Chuck Grassley, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, posted in March after a Washington judge temporarily barred Trump from carrying out mass deportations. “If the Supreme Court or Congress doesn’t fix, we’re headed towards a constitutional crisis.”

In April, Attorney General Pam Bondi called the swathe of lawsuits filed against White House actions a “constitutional crisis.”

“President Trump’s executive authority has been undermined since the first hours of his presidency by an endless barrage of injunctions designed to halt his agenda,” she said in June.

Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson asserted congressional authority over U.S. courts, and appeared in March to threaten to disempower district courts if it came down to it. “We do have the authority over the federal courts, as you know. We can eliminate an entire district court,” Johnson said. “We have power of funding over the courts and all these other things. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and Congress is going to act.”

But the Administration has also gone beyond verbally criticizing the courts. The Justice Department in Trump’s second term has moved to prosecute several of his perceived enemies and judges that have pushed back on his political agenda. In April, Hannah Dugan, a Wisconsin judge, was arrested for allegedly aiding an undocumented immigrant to leave a courthouse. In July, the DOJ filed a misconduct complaint against James Boasberg, chief judge of the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., over alleged comments Boasberg made at a meeting of judges in March. In a social media post, Trump called for Boasberg, without naming him, to be impeached: “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!”

The Administration has disregarded court orders, including plowing ahead with deporting 238 Venezuelans to an El Salvador prison in March after Boasberg blocked the deportations. A Washington Post examination of 165 lawsuits in which judges ruled against the Trump Administration found “widespread noncompliance with America’s legal system” by the Administration. The White House is accused of “defying or frustrating court oversight” in nearly 35% of those cases. Nonprofit media outlet Truthout reported in June that the Trump Administration also appeared to have defied a federal court order allowing transgender people to update gender markers on their passports.

“Lawyers are a regulated profession,” Dana Gold of the Government Accountability Project in Washington, D.C., told Global Insight. “The Department of Justice is inherently the bastion where the rules of professional conduct play a meta role because they are supposed to be serving justice.”

“If the Department of Justice is willing to bend, to basically break its own rules of professional conduct, it’s a red line being crossed,” she added.

More than 150 ex-federal and state judges in May signed a letter to Bondi and Patel rebuking the Administration’s attacks on the judiciary, as critics have said that the Trump Administration’s rhetoric fuels broader threats against judges.

“What we need is our political leaders from the top down to stop fanning these flames, to stop using irresponsible rhetoric, to stop referring to judges as corrupt and biased and monsters that hate America,” Esther Salas, a federal judge in New Jersey whose son was killed in 2020 by an attorney pretending to be delivering pizza, told NPR.

France’s new prime minister resigned on Monday after less than a month in office, sinking the country further into a political crisis and dealing a fresh blow to President Emmanuel Macron.

• Drone delivery is gaining momentum with pilot programs from Chipotle, GoTo Foods, and beyond.
• Regulatory changes, including a June executive order, have given the sector a significant boost.
• Safety, reliability, and noise concerns remain as drone delivery expands in suburban areas.

After years of stalled experiments and regulatory hurdles, drone delivery is beginning to take flight in the US.

Chipotle in August began teaming up with drone delivery and logistics provider Zipline to ensure Dallas area fans can get their burritos and bowls delivered — anytime, and almost any place. In June, GoTo Foods partnered with DoorDash and Wing to bring items from its portfolio of brands, including Auntie Anne’s and Jamba, to three Texas markets: Frisco, Fort Worth, and Plano.

The pilot programs build upon short-lived drone delivery experiments from other brands that have been rolled out and subsequently discontinued over the last decade, like the Flytrex and El Pollo Loco partnership, which briefly took to the skies in 2021.

This moment, however, seems to be different, five industry insiders told Business Insider.

“I do think it’s an inflection point for the industry,” Kent Ferguson, head of partnerships for Wing, said. “We have an improving regulatory framework to allow us to service more customers and scale much more quickly. We have the infrastructure that is flexible, cost-effective, and we have the planes on hand — thousands of planes — to service the millions of customers.”

Multiple companies, including Zipline, Wing, Flytrex, and DroneUp, are vying for commercial drone dominance with their unique designs of unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, for short. Some of the aircraft resemble miniature passenger planes, while others resemble hobbyist drones, featuring four rotating propellers and an attached payload.

From an operational standpoint, the challenges of drone delivery for participating retailers are the same as those of an order being picked up by a human driver or a robot courier, GoTo Foods’ chief commercial officer, Kieran Donahue, told Business Insider.

“We still have to make sure we get the right items in the bag, that the food is prepared properly,” Donahue said. “It doesn’t matter whether it’s coming from a DoorDasher in a traditional car or a drone.”

The benefits to retailers, though, are clear: faster delivery times, lower labor costs, and increased customer satisfaction — and it’s not just GoTo Foods and Chipotle that want in on the perks. Major grocery players, including Walmart and Amazon, are rolling out pilot programs at scale. Getting dinner ingredients delivered by drone may soon be as common as ordering take-out through Grubhub or Uber Eats.

A recent regulatory breakthrough

Although drone technology has become increasingly useful to the commercial sector in recent years due to technological advancements, the recent momentum isn’t thanks to better hardware alone — it’s also due to the regulatory climate.

L.R. Fox is the founder and CEO of WhiteFox Defense Technologies and vice chair of the US Chamber of Commerce Drone Committee. He told Business Insider that a June executive order signed by President Donald Trump was a catalytic moment for the industry. It signaled a path forward and broke through an otherwise complicated web of federal regulations that had prevented widespread adoption.

“The key thing that enables drone delivery is known as ‘Beyond Visual Line of Sight,'” Fox said. “Up until this point, you have companies that had literally a guy standing on a rooftop, flying the drone until he can’t see anymore, and then another guy standing on a rooftop and taking over control of the drone.”

The executive order set the stage for the Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration, which control the country’s airspace, to enable and monitor routine Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations for drones for commercial and public safety purposes.

So far, the test programs are gaining traction and shaving precious minutes off delivery times, representatives for both GoTo Foods and Chipotle told Business Insider.

“What’s unique about drone delivery is, with this particular technology, we don’t have to implement the drones at every restaurant to be able to still have full coverage of an area,” Chipotle chief technology officer Curt Garner said. “One restaurant out of five or six may be able to have the same delivery radius that we would typically experience with somebody going into a restaurant and driving a car as a courier.”

The Texas market, in particular, has been a playground for drone pilot programs, in part because of its temperate weather and the layout of its cities, Harrison Shih, head of the DoorDash Drone Program, told Business Insider.

“It’s fairly suburban, a lot of single-family homes,” Shih said. “These are the profiles that drones fly really well in, where they can lower packages.”

The DoorDash Drone Program is also operating in Charlotte, North Carolina, for similar reasons. Both sites offer the company essential testing data for scaling up in more congested neighborhoods.

“Hopefully, what we see in 2026 is that the market will open up, and more and more metropolitan areas will be able to be covered,” Shih said.

Still to tackle: No-drone zones and propeller noise

Still, as these experiments move closer to the mainstream, questions about safety and reliability persist.

A 2024 survey by the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator for Political Economy and Regulation found that 70% of respondents were concerned that drones would disturb their neighborhoods and may be unsafe, and 51% would oppose legislation to expand US airspace for delivery drones.

“Right now, if somebody launched a drone and had a bomb on it, there’s very little anybody can do to stop it,” Fox said. “Not from a technology standpoint, but just from a deployment and authorities standpoint — local or state law enforcement cannot do anything to stop a drone, it’s a federal crime for them to do that, which is insane.”

Federal authorities have limited authority to disable or destroy threatening drones that pose a threat to their facilities or national security. Proposed laws aim to grant state and local police more authority, but have not yet been passed.

One of the primary concerns in the industry now is that when companies fly hundreds or thousands of drones a day across various populated areas, “one of them is going to have some kind of incident,” Fox said.

“So working through how that’s resolved is definitely a factor,” he added. “Then, trying to ensure that it doesn’t cause a complete halt or pause to the industry.”

Beyond the safety concerns, other practical considerations are still being addressed, such as determining suitable delivery zones and mitigating noise from propeller blades.

“The likelihood of the drone delivery straight to your window is very far off,” Fox said. “We might not ever see in our lifetimes.”

For now, when using platforms like Wing and Zipline, customers mark their preferred delivery zone when setting up their order — generally required to be a flat surface the size of a picnic blanket with clear skies overhead.

Garner said Zipline is addressing noise concerns from both design and operational standpoints: “The drones are quite high in the air when the payload is lowered, so that buzzing noise that you would typically associate with a zone with the drone isn’t audible,” he said.

Even with hurdles ahead, the companies testing drones say the momentum is more real now than it has been before. By shaving minutes off delivery times, reducing labor costs, and opening up new occasions for off-premise dining — from soccer fields to suburban cul-de-sacs — drones are being positioned not as a gimmick but as a serious tool in the future of last-mile logistics.

If these trials succeed, the next frontier in convenience shopping might not be at your doorstep, but hovering right above it.