Figure AI retired its Figure 02 robot fleet by having them walk into a 75-ton vat of molten steel

Figure AI decommissioned its retiring Figure 02 humanoid fleet on Sept. 30 by training the robots to walk autonomously into a 75-ton electric arc furnace at a foundry in Imatra, Finland -- the only facility, Figure says, that would take the project, after sites in the US and Mexico turned it down over lithium-ion battery safety concerns. "We actually trained our robots to jump autonomously, shipped them to Finland, and had them leap into a vat of molten steel," the company said, adding the line specifically to head off skepticism that the footage was AI-generated. The robots were trained to perform the leap at Figure's San Jose campus before shipping. The furnace ran 6 melt cycles over 24 hours, each with roughly a 20-minute window before the steel cooled too far to pour.

The fleet being retired isn't a prototype that never shipped -- it's the one that spent 11 months on BMW's Spartanburg, South Carolina line, working 10-hour shifts, Monday through Friday, and contributing to the production of more than 30,000 BMW X3s and the loading of over 90,000 sheet-metal parts, at a reported 99% accuracy on metal placement. Figure CEO Brett Adcock has said the deployment "taught us early lessons on what it takes to ship." The company is replacing F.02 with its newer F.03 fleet, already running at the same BMW facility since June, and says maintaining two generations of hardware in parallel no longer makes sense -- melting the retired units down protects proprietary design details that disassembling them piece by piece would expose.

Destroying hardware rather than refurbishing or donating it is unusual outside this industry, but humanoid robotics isn't most industries right now: Figure, Tesla's Optimus program, Unitree, and Agility Robotics are all racing on proprietary actuator and hand designs they'd rather melt than let a rival's engineers take apart. Figure didn't disclose the exact fleet size being decommissioned or what happens to any units a customer might have purchased outright rather than leased, and the company's own post leans into the spectacle as much as the engineering reasoning -- the Schwarzenegger film is framed as entertainment first, disclosure second.