You say that like it is a bad thing. :-)
Fun fact, in the mid-80's early 90's the "industry" was "getting ahead" of the Department of Defense in terms of capabilities that could be deployed in an adversarial way. One of the most visible outcomes was the first crypto wars. (source code became ITAR controlled, emailing a perl script that implemented the RSA algorithm to someone outside the country was an ITAR violation, and we joking suggested illegal immigrants get that code tattooed on their body so that it would be illegal to deport them without a license from the Dept. Of Commerce)
Getting an inertial navigation unit w/sensors that weighed less than 10kg (22 lbs) was code word level secret stuff, because beyond the line of sight missiles are a thing.
Anyway. the US DoD (like the defense departments everywhere) realized they needed to be more engaged with R&D labs if only to see what progress they were making so that they could anticipate whether or not that progress might show up as a threat in some way. On the plus side that freed up some money that would have been in black budgets for universities that were doing similar research anyway and as a funder, the source, in this case the DoD, generally gets a non-exclusive perpetual right to use any resulting IP out of that sort of funding arrangement, even when patented.
Bottom line, researchers are gonna research, so make sure what the future holds is not gonna show up unexpectedly on the battlefield or in other covert ways.
All that said, as someone who has been involved in building this "scale" of robot (under 1m, self powered) the progress has been freakin' unbelievable. In part because of the fact that you can put a supercomputer on one that weighs less than 500 g and runs for 8 hours on a battery that weighs less than 1 kg. Sensors, video, real time image processing. All pretty stunning.
The Ukranian use of off the shelf drones, and their rapid development of weaponized "drone munitions" tells me that the DoD is correct in wanting to keep track of what is going on with robots that can do "extreme parkour."