For its 13 years in businesses, robot security company Knightscope has weathered a remarkable run of self-inflicted disasters.

Founded “in response to the tragic shootings at Sandy Hook, the Boston bombings, and the attacks of 9/11” — that’s taken verbatim from the company’s About page — Knightscope has transformed from a pie-in-the-sky robotics startup to a corporate has-been whose servos continue to fire despite an ever-lengthening track record of failure. Since listing on the NASDAQ index in early 2022, the company’s stock has plummeted from an all-time high closing price of $1,070 to just $2 in June of 2026, for losses of over 99 percent.

Tellingly, the company’s flagship product is also its most visible flop: the K5 Autonomous Security Robot. Taking the form of a 420-pound plasticky egg, K5s have mainly made headlines through extraordinary mishaps like drowning in a fountain and running down a 16-month-old-toddler. In Huntington Park, California, a K5 unit refused to help a woman attempting to report an emergency through the robot’s on-board emergency-alert button. Rather than summoning police — pretty much the bot’s only job — the K5 told the woman to “step out of the way” so that it could continue its slow-motion patrol down the sidewalk.

Not even the notoriously tech-obsessed NYPD renewed its contract with Knightscope, probably because the K5 required constant monitoring by human cops to protect it from the wear and tear of New York City. It’s not wowing small-town law enforcement, either: a local police department in Ohio sacked the bot after it spent an entire year without helping with an arrest or issuing a single ticket.

Predictably, Knightscope executives are now turning to artificial intelligence, telling investors in their Q1 2026 earnings report that AI will rewire the robotics industry and help make the company’s human security operations more efficient.

Maybe AI will eventually make the K5 a worthy partner for police departments whose bloated budgets already include extensive carve-outs for AI cameras and surveillance drones. But for now, Knightscope’s most visible AI deployment seems to be a series of bizarre, self-published fan fiction depicting its robots on the frontlines of a suburban dystopia called “Sentinel Shores.”

The company describes describes “The Knightscope Chronicles” as a “gripping collection of true crime-fighting short stories” that are “inspired by actual events.” In each installment, the company’s security bots and surveillance devices “empower businesses, law enforcement, and communities to prevent and solve crimes.”

Reading the stories, though, it strains credulity to imagine that they’re actually based on real events in any meaningful way. Each installment feels like a fever dream of absurd fear mongering about crime, meant to hype Knightscope’s brand of high-tech surveillance and divorced from reality in unintentionally comical ways.

The prose in each story is deeply stilted, featuring the distinctive cadence of an AI chatbot. Each tableau is also illustrated with generative AI, resulting in freakish scenes rife with garbled text and hallucinated details, like a diminutive squad car parked inside a police station filled with surveillance feeds.

Perhaps the most deranged story comes in Knightscope Chronicle #8, which describes a terrifying man-ogre — his “giant shape” is “too broad, frame crooked and wrong,” the story insists, his “face twisted” and “jaw offset, one eye higher than the other” — as he bursts into a gas station, slays the clerk with a nail gun, and then terrorizes a random barefoot woman.

She hides in the restroom, but the perpetrator smashes through the door using — we are not kidding — his face: the story describes “his face smashing against the door, grunts wet and awful between blows,” prompting the woman to flee out the window. The man-orc pursues her, blasting off nails that slam “into the asphalt feet from where she runs.”

We should pause here to mention that Knightscope included an AI-generated image of what the murderer looks like. We’ll just let it speak for itself:

Fortunately, the woman soon happens across a K1 Hemisphere, a police call box by Knightscope that takes the form of a silver orb, which she uses to beg for help.

“You’re not alone. Stay on the line,” a voice assures her, which sounds like horrible advice when a homicidal fiend is shooting a barrage of nails in your direction. “Officers are on the way.”

In another stroke of luck, the woman then happens across a K5 Autonomous Security Robot. In real life, that’s the same model that drowned itself in a fountain and got dumped by the NYPD after its trial period was up. Yet in the Knightscope Chronicles, it performs its job with crack-shot efficiency by contacting dispatch, who summon Border Patrol.

Wait, what? Border Patrol? Yes, just roll with it. In the Fox News anti-logic of Knightscope’s tale, Border Patrol shows up in the nick of time, shoots the man with a taser, and when that’s unsuccessful, rips him apart with “a hundred rounds tearing through the trees.”

“The giant staggers, flinches, then finally collapses into the dirt,” the story continues. “Silent. Finished.”

In an email to Futurism, Knightscope’s director of business development Chris Garza didn’t provide any direct evidence that the outrageous tales were true, saying only that the stories were “inspired by real-life events but have been adapted into short stories to protect the privacy of the organizations and individuals involved.”

Frankly, that’s hard to imagine. Nail guns are impractical as weapons and have only rarely been used in homicides. In fact, we couldn’t find a single case in which a nail gun was used to kill a clerk at a gas station, nevermind in an incident involving a police robot.

It’s also worth noting that even in this seemingly fictional world, there’s nothing remarkable about the battery of Knightscope tech on display. Both the callbox the woman uses and the K5 robot essentially serve the role of a cell phone or security camera; all they do is summon real help from emergency responders, who do all the heavy lifting.

We’re similarly skeptical that the company’s other tales were “inspired by actual events.” In Knightscope Chronicles #7, a flamboyant con artist known as “Baby Bob” defrauds the elderly — until he’s caught by another K5 robot, which spots him as he “peeled off a mask” that had been hiding his identity. Again, we can’t find any real-world cases that involves a police robot seeing a scammer peeling off a mask.

Other irregularities abound. In Knightscope Chronicles #5, City Hall receives a threatening call to “keep your eyes on the bridge Halloween morning,” and deploys yet another K5 to monitor the area (somebody clearly needs to audit the Sentinel Shores police budget). The bot soon locks in on a suspicious man, using “thermal imaging” to detect a gun under his clothes, and recording him as he mutters menacing phrases like “they’ll regret ignoring me.” As the story goes: “law enforcement intercepted him within 5 minutes,” finding a “scoped rifle” somehow hidden under his outfit, along with plans for a massacre.

If you think about this one for a few seconds, it makes no sense. If City Hall knew when the threatening man would be on the bridge, why waste the money deploying a K5 when officers were available anyway? Such is the logic of AI-generated slop stories, apparently.

Asked to share the inspiration behind the Knightscope Chronicles, Garza referred us to a list of the company’s “crime fighting wins,” which includes vaguely-worded achievements like improving “feeling of safety” and enabling “perimeter expansion.”

If you squint, some of the company’s success stories vaguely track with the Knightscope Chronicles — one about a Knightscope robot assisting “a real estate owner in stopping a fraudulent insurance claim” could be an incredibly loose inspiration for Baby Bob, for example, at least if you ignore virtually every specific detail of the story.

But let’s be real, that’s a pretty big stretch. It’s also worth noting all but two of Knightscope’s crime fighting wins are presented without sources or third-party testimony. And the two with evidence are extremely underwhelming: one is a statement from the city manager of Huntington Park, California explaining that “the K5 robot is having a positive impact on crime and nuisance activity” at a local park. The other involves a Knightscope unit helping end a “multi-year police search” by providing cops with a license plate number, vehicle details, and identifiable video of a suspect caught in the act. That sounds promising, until you learn that the man police apprehended wasn’t some Shrek-looking serial killer, but was instead “responsible for dumping boats on city streets,” whatever that means.

In other words, it’s hard to see how those tepid examples could inspire the hell world of Sentinel Shores.

As embarrassing as the Chronicles are, they reveal something important about how this kind of surveillance infrastructure is sold. The robots don’t need to work particularly well to help Knightscope secure its contracts; they just need to address a vibe that criminals are everywhere, especially your sleepy suburban town. Each Chronicle shares the thesis that monstrous, random crime is inevitable — and only a permanent technological presence can contain it.

In his email statement, Knightscope’s Garza assured us that “given the recent acquisition and corporate strategy of building the nation’s first Autonomous Security Force, an all-new website is due out soon.”

What that “first Autonomous Security Force” might encompass is probably a longer and more unsettling story. Though we’re sad to hear that the Knightscope Chronicles may be fading from the public eye, we’re even more horrified at the thought of an autonomous surveillance regime run by a company which felt comfortable publishing them in the first place.

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