Parody video shows ‘military robots ready for war’

A video that appears to show a robot shooting targets with precision even as humans prod and push it over has some people online claiming the footage shows a new kind of soldier. 

"They got military robots ready for war," a recent Instagram post says. 

It was flagged as part of Facebook’s efforts to combat false news and misinformation on its News Feed. (Read more about our partnership with Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.)

The video originated on the YouTube channel Corridor Crew, which creates and shares videos such as an edited "Star Wars" clip to improve the aim of the franchise’s Stormtroopers. 

The Instagram post shows just a few moments of the approximately four-minute long video titled "New robot makes soldiers obsolete." But watching the full video clarifies that this isn’t real. At one point, subtitles supposedly translating for the robot read, "oh no not bees I hate bees," as a box full of bees is unleashed on the machine. 

The October 2019 YouTube post also has a disclaimer: "This video is a comedic parody and is not owned, endorsed, created by or associated with the Boston Dynamics company." 

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The words "Bosstown Dynamics" appear in the corner of the video, a spoof of the company Boston Dynamics, which has created well-known robots such as a quadrupedal known as Spot. Boston Dynamics recently pledged not to weaponize its robots, Axios first reported.

A day after posting its video about a new robot making soldiers obsolete, Corridor Crew posted another showing how it "used CGI to fake military robots." The behind-the-scenes footageshows a person in the position where the "robot" ultimately appeared in the video. (CGI stands for "computer generated imagery.")

We rate claims that the footage in the post shows a real military robot False.