Robots of No Nation

"The imagined community of the nation is always limited and sovereign, yet human connections and cooperation stretch far beyond borders." — Benedict Anderson

Humanity Keeps Learning to Cooperate at Scale

Step back far enough and human history reads as one long story of scaling cooperation, from small-scale kin groups to larger political formations to modern nation-states to the global networks we live in now. None of it moved in a straight line. Empires rose and fell, nationalism united and divided, globalization connected some and excluded others. History doesn't really progress so much as move: messy, cyclical, and full of contradiction.

Technology keeps changing the terrain underneath all of it. Roads, the printing press, the internet: each one let people connect and coordinate beyond the reach of any central authority. And we've carried our ideologies, ambitions, and fears into every one of them.

AI Is Geopolitical, Whether We Like It or Not

AI isn't a neutral tool sitting above the fray. It's geopolitical, and nation-states are already competing to control it, robots most of all. Machines that can perceive and act can reinforce old hierarchies or dismantle them, surveil people or set them free. In the wrong hands, they're used to stoke division, profit from lies, and spur conflict.

For some of us this isn't abstract; we come from places where war isn't distant history but family history. Given the choice, we'd rather build machines that bring people together than ones that drive them apart.

Building Across Borders

Robotics is a sprawling, multidisciplinary problem, too big for any one country, company, or lab to crack alone. We believe the best robots will come from collective effort across the world: a Japanese chassis, German firmware, an American policy, a Korean perception model, all working together.

We're living proof of that: a hybrid team based in 3 countries, many of us third culture kids used to growing up between worlds. It's easier to build for all of humanity when you've never fit neatly into a single nation or culture.

Toward a Humanity-Aligned World

So we've picked a side, and it's a simple one: humanity first. We build for people, not for governments or factions. The robots and AI we make should enable:

• Shared prosperity
• Universal education
• Peaceful collaboration

They must empower humanity to do more.