A $1.3 million government contract has split Boston Dynamics from the inside.
According to Ars Technica's reconstruction, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security awarded a contract on September 25 to Radeco, a Connecticut company, to supply Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with four modified Spot quadruped robots. Radeco sells its modified Spot under the platform name Cerberus, adding an oxygen sensor, a 30x zoom camera, a 360-degree camera and infrared thermal imaging, with an optional robotic arm, and it can run autonomous missions with “minimal human intervention.” The uses listed in the contract include detecting radiation, toxic gas leaks and explosive threats, and it also mentions supporting operations against illegal cross-border tunnels.
More than 300 signatures
The Boston Globe and WBUR obtained an employee petition demanding that executives halt the deal. It gathered more than 300 signatures, about half of them anonymous. The company employs roughly 1,400 people, so signers make up around 20 percent of the workforce.
The petition's argument leans on the company's own interests:
“The risk for Boston Dynamics is simply too great to continue with this deal.”
The petitioners also worry about hiring, arguing that the decision will make the company less attractive to job candidates.
Management's response
Leadership did not back down. A company spokesperson called Spot a “tool that keeps people out of harm's way.” In an email to staff, former interim CEO Amanda McMaster wrote that the decision fits the company's mission of advancing intelligent machines in an ethical way that serves humanity, and asked employees who disagree to “respect and accept” it.
The company says Boston Dynamics will mainly provide technical support under the contract and that the actual customer will primarily be Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). Its sales terms prohibit using the product to “intentionally harm or intimidate any person or animal.” The company says it will act immediately if it finds misuse, including voiding the warranty and terminating the license, and says no customer has so far violated these terms. That claim cannot currently be independently verified, and there is no public channel for checking how the robots are used after delivery.
Connecting the dots
Spot has been caught up in law-enforcement controversy before. In 2021, the New York Police Department ended its Spot lease early under public pressure; local media called the robot Digidog. In 2022, Boston Dynamics led a group of peer companies in signing an open letter pledging not to weaponize general-purpose mobile robots or support others in doing so. The company's repeated insistence this time that the robots will not be weaponized rests on the line drawn by that letter: it governs whether a weapon is mounted, not who gets to use the robot.
Ownership is also part of the picture. Hyundai Motor Group completed its acquisition of Boston Dynamics in June 2021. On September 4, 2025, ICE and HSI raided a Hyundai battery plant construction site in Georgia and detained 475 people, most of them South Korean workers. According to the Brennan Center, HSI took a large part in deportations and workplace raids during Trump's first term and has shifted thousands of agents to immigration enforcement in the second. The same enforcement system that raided the parent company's site is now a buyer of the subsidiary's robots.
The company's business is also expanding: it plans to invest $100 million in an advanced robotics and AI facility in Waltham, Massachusetts, adding 1,250 jobs by 2033, and Hyundai intends to deploy “thousands” of Atlas humanoid robots in its U.S. factories. Next to those figures, four Spot units at $1.3 million is small, and what employees are arguing about is mostly where the line should be drawn.
There is no word yet on whether petition signatures will keep growing or whether management will add usage restrictions to its terms.
Sources: Ars Technica, The Boston Globe, CocoLoop, WBUR; contract details from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security were used to verify the contract amount and robot count.