Figure AI has found perhaps the most aggressively on-brand way possible to retire a humanoid robot: teach it to jump, ship it to Finland, and send it into molten steel.
On September 30, Figure published its F.02 decommissioning account, explaining that the growing F.03 fleet made continued maintenance of F.02 impractical. The older machines also contained custom actuators and proprietary hardware that Figure did not want circulating outside the company, while careful manual disassembly would consume engineering time needed for F.04.
The result looks like somebody gave a robotics engineering team the ending of Terminator 2 as a disposal SOP. Figure says Arnold Schwarzenegger himself suggested melting the robots after the company asked the internet how F.02 should be sent off.
Figure’s main decommissioning post showed the finished spectacle.
The robots actually learned the jump
This was more than a movie gag. Figure says its engineers installed large airbags at the San Jose campus and taught F.02 units to jump from the second floor. Stunt performers supplied motion references, and the team trained a new AI model in simulation to target the molten-steel container at a foundry the robots had never visited.
CEO Brett Adcock later emphasized that the jumps were autonomous—not CGI—and posted behind-the-scenes footage of the training and final trip to Finland.
The engineering constraints were unusually hostile. The Finnish site used a 75-ton electric arc furnace powered by three graphite electrodes. Figure had 24 hours and six melts, with roughly a 20-minute working window per melt before the steel began forming a hard crust. Heat and electromagnetic fields reportedly knocked out some camera equipment while the robots continued running their AI policies.
Independent coverage from Interesting Engineering describes the same combination of autonomous control, extreme furnace conditions and the company’s need to destroy proprietary hardware without turning a robot teardown into an IP giveaway.
A ridiculous stunt with a serious hardware problem underneath
Humanoid companies are iterating hardware at a pace closer to consumer electronics than traditional industrial machinery. BitcoinVersus.Tech recently covered UBTECH’s push toward a humanoid every 10 minutes and Berkeley’s sub-$5,000 open-source humanoid. Figure’s furnace stunt exposes the other end of that acceleration: what happens when an expensive, highly proprietary robot generation becomes obsolete quickly?
It also arrives while the legal and philosophical status of machines is getting less hypothetical. Our recent examination of whether robots could eventually receive rights comparable to humans suddenly reads differently when a robot is deliberately trained to execute its own final jump.
For now, F.02 is hardware, not a legal person. But Figure has accidentally produced one of the strangest visual metaphors yet for the speed of physical AI: the machine that helped build cars at BMW did not retire to a museum. It learned one final autonomous behavior and disappeared into a furnace.
BitcoinVersus.Tech
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