The architecture of robot software has changed more in the past two years than in the previous two decades. The transition from task-specific modular systems to unified foundation models is not incremental improvement. It is a different approach to what a robot fundamentally is. The GAO’s 2026 S&T report documents this shift with precision. The previous generation of robot software divided cognition into pipeline stages: a perception module processed sensor input, a planning module generated action sequences, an actuation module executed them.