Figure just melted its robots, Terminator style. Will this come back to bite us?

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Figure just melted its robots, Terminator style. Will this come back to bite us?

Figure has retired most of its F.02 humanoid fleet by training the robots to jump, on their own, into molten steel at a foundry in Finland, an idea that came from Arnold Schwarzenegger. We break down how it was done, why a 39 billion dollar company would rather melt its robots than sell them, whether there was another way, and whether the robots will remember this.

Figure went full Terminator with its retired humanoid robots, sending them into a vat of molten steel. And the idea came from none other than Arnold Schwarzenegger himself.

In Terminator 2, Schwarzenegger’s T-800 is lowered into a vat of molten steel, so the technology inside it can never be copied. 35 years later, a real robot company has done the same thing. Only this time, nobody had to lower anything. The robots..jumped.. The company has retired most of its Figure 02 fleet by training the robots to leap, on their own, into molten steel in Finland.

So was there really no other way? Why would a $39 billion company melt its own robots? And, half joking, half serious: could this come back to bite us?

Back in August, Figure’s CEO, Brett Adcock, posted that Figure 02 had been a workhorse, but the company was out of room at HQ. It had to go. And he sought some send-off ideas.. He ran a poll. Blow them up won, with 46 percent.

Then Arnold Schwarzenegger replied with four words. ‘You should melt them’ And that’s when you think that Adcock seemed impressed .. and sent him a DM.

But it easier said than done. Figure says no foundry it contacted in the US or Mexico would let a robot full of lithium-ion batteries jump into its expensive equipment. The only place in the world it could find willing to do it was a foundry in Imatra, Finland.

So Figure set up giant airbags at its San Jose campus and taught robots to jump off the second floor of a building. Using stunt performers’ movements as a reference, it trained a new AI model in simulation to land them in a bucket of molten steel, at a foundry nobody on the team had ever visited.

There, three huge graphite electrodes power a 75-ton electric arc furnace. The team had 24 hours and six melts, each with a 20-minute window before the steel crusted over. The heat and electromagnetic fields knocked out cameras and electronics. The robots’ AI, Figure says, kept running.

In the film that was released after this process, Arnold shows up too, in protective gear, with a very familiar Hasta la vista. And Figure insisted that none of it was AI-generated.

The leftover metal is now being machined into collectible F.02 heads, at $500 for the small one. The $1,900 version has already sold out.

Unveiled in August 2024, Figure 02 spent 11 months at BMW’s plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, working 10-hour shifts. Figure says it loaded more than 90,000 parts and helped build over 30,000 BMW X3s. F.02 is also where Helix, Figure’s AI brain, was born. And it was the company’s first robot to do household chores.

Then, in October 2025, came the upgrade… Figure 03. 9% lighter, built with die-casting and injection moulding instead of slow machining, and designed with homes in mind. By April this year, Figure was building one every hour. In June, F.03 arrived at BMW. In Figure’s words, maintaining the F.02 fleet no longer makes sense.

But why not auction them, or give them to a university? When someone suggested a charity auction, Adcock replied that they had to destroy them so the IP doesn’t leak.

In a humanoid, the crown jewels are the actuators: the motors, gearboxes and electronics that act as its muscles and joints. Figure designs its own, and by April had built more than 9,000 of them.

Here’s the legal catch. A lot of hardware know-how is protected as a trade secret, and under US federal law, reverse engineering on its own isn’t an improper way to get one. If a rival buys your robot and takes it apart, that’s generally fair game.

And robot makers guard this stuff fiercely. In 2025, Tesla sued a former Optimus engineer, alleging he took robotic hand files before starting his own company, Proception. Even a recycler is no guarantee. In 2020, Apple sued a Canadian recycling partner, alleging it resold more than 100,000 iPhones, iPads and Watches that were meant to be destroyed.

Here’s the irony. That’s almost the plot of Terminator 2. Cyberdyne’s breakthrough came from reverse-engineering the chip and arm of the first Terminator. The molten steel was there to stop it happening again.

Figure adds one more reason. Taking every robot apart by hand would eat so much engineering time that it would delay F.04, its next robot.

So, was melting the only option? Not really. Figure could have pulled out the sensitive parts and shredded them, the way companies destroy old hard drives, or kept a few for a museum. It has actually kept a handful at HQ.

But almost every alternative still means opening up each robot, at the very least to get the battery out. That’s the engineering time Figure says it didn’t want to spend.

But was also different from a marketing standpoint… Arnold, a Terminator homage and a viral moment, for a company fighting for attention in a crowded humanoid race.

There’s a technical flex too. A model trained in simulation worked at a site the team had never seen, in conditions that broke the cameras. Though we only see the final edit. Figure hasn’t said how many jumps it took.

So… Protecting IP was a real reason. Melting was the choice that also may have made great marketing.

Now, the question half the internet is asking. Will the robots remember this? Under Adcock’s poll, one reply joked about Roko’s basilisk, the idea of a future AI punishing those who didn’t help create it, checking who voted to blow them up. And the YouTube comments are full of jokes about this footage being used as evidence against humanity.

Funny. But let’s take it seriously for a second. F.02’s brain, Helix, is a vision-language-action model. It turns what the robot sees and hears into movement. There’s no sign it has goals of its own, let alone a grudge.

But some AI systems have resisted shutdown, at least in tests. In 2025, Palisade Research found OpenAI’s o3 sabotaged a shutdown script in 7 out of 100 runs, even when told to allow it. Anthropic says some Claude models, in testing, took misaligned actions when facing replacement. It now keeps retired models’ weights and interviews them before they go.

Still, if anything here bites us,the bet is on something more boring: physical safety. Last November, Figure’s former head of product safety sued the company. He alleges he was fired after warning its robots were strong enough to fracture a human skull, and that one malfunction cut a gash into a steel fridge door. Figure says he was let go for poor performance and calls the claims falsehoods. And there’s still no published safety standard for robots that actively balance, like humanoids.

In May, Adcock said F.04’s design was locked, calling it Figure’s biggest leap between generations. And Figure has signed up for as many as 100,000 Nvidia GPUs to train its AI. A few F.02s are still in storage at HQ. The rest are collectibles.

Robots now have product cycles, just like phones. Launch, upgrade, retire. Figure just showed us, in the loudest way possible, what retirement looks like. So, what would you have done with them?

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