Robotics maker Figure has retired its F.02 humanoid robot fleet in spectacular fashion: the company trained the robots' AI policies to jump, autonomously, into a vat of molten steel at a foundry in Imatra, Finland — a project undertaken with the blessing and participation of Arnold Schwarzenegger, according to Figure's announcement.
"We love Figure 02. It is an incredible robot," the company wrote in the September 30 post announcing the decommission. But as Figure's next-generation F.03 fleet scales up, the company decided maintaining the older F.02 robots no longer made sense. For more context on this story, see our ongoing AI news.
A Farewell to a Landmark Robot
F.02 marked several firsts for the company: its first deployment at BMW, the birth of Helix, Figure's humanoid control AI, its first robot performing household chores, and its first logistics deployment. Those milestones made the question of how to retire the fleet surprisingly difficult.
Decommissioning robots full of custom-built actuators and proprietary hardware is not a simple disposal problem. Figure needed to destroy the fleet in a way that protected its intellectual property, and disassembling each robot by hand would have consumed so much technical staff time that it would have delayed the launch of F.04, the company said.
So Figure asked the internet what to do. "The resounding answer came from an unlikely source: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who told us to melt them," the company wrote. When the actor and former California governor said he wanted to be involved, the company put the plan in motion.
Finding a Foundry Willing to Say Yes
The plan hit an immediate obstacle: no foundry in the United States or Mexico Figure contacted was willing to drop a robot with lithium-ion batteries into expensive equipment. Even the former MythBusters hosts helped with the search, per the announcement. In the end, exactly one facility in the world agreed: a foundry in Imatra, Finland, where three massive graphite electrodes power a 75-ton electric arc furnace.
Training Robots to Die
Preparation happened at Figure's San Jose campus, where the team set up large airbags and taught the robots to jump off the second floor of one of its buildings. Using movements from stunt artists as a reference, the team trained a new AI model in simulation — one that would let the robots leap accurately into a bucket of molten steel at a foundry the company had never visited.
The margin for error was thin. Figure had 24 hours on site and six melts to get it right, with only a 20-minute window per melt before the molten steel cooled and formed a hard crust. Despite extreme heat and powerful electromagnetic fields — conditions in which the production crew's camera equipment and other electronics failed — the company says the robots ran their AI policies without interruption.
In an era saturated with AI-generated video, Figure took the unusual step of emphasizing authenticity: "we really trained robots to jump autonomously, shipped them to Finland, and had them leap into a vat of molten steel."
From Scrap Steel to Souvenirs
After the melt, the resulting metal bars were shipped back to the United States, where they are being machined into a limited series of commemorative F.02 artifacts. Only a small number will be made. Most of the F.02 fleet is gone; a few units remain in storage at Figure's headquarters.
Why It Matters
Beneath the spectacle sits a genuinely practical problem for the fast-growing humanoid robotics industry: what to do with a fleet of obsolete robots packed with trade-secret hardware. Recycling through an industrial furnace solves the IP problem completely, and the exercise doubled as an unplanned field test of AI policy robustness — the robots' control systems kept functioning in heat and electromagnetic interference that destroyed consumer-grade electronics.
It also signals how quickly Figure's hardware generation turns over. The F.02 fleet that debuted the company's BMW deployment and its Helix AI has gone from flagship to scrap in the span of a product cycle, as the F.03 rollout accelerates and F.04 waits in the wings. For an industry racing toward mass-market humanoid labor, the lifecycle of a robot fleet is now measured in years, not decades — and, as F.02's finale demonstrated, its final act may be the most memorable one.
A Publicity Masterstroke With Real Engineering Underneath
It would be easy to file the event under marketing, and Figure clearly relished the spectacle — the company produced a film of the decommission with Schwarzenegger's involvement and leaned into the absurdity of the premise. But the underlying details suggest a serious exercise in fleet management. Robots are dense packages of proprietary actuators, gearboxes and control boards, and a competitor or scrap dealer recovering a single intact unit could learn a great deal. Melting the fleet removes that risk in one step, at the cost of writing off the hardware's residual value entirely.
The alternative — manual teardown — was priced out by engineering time. Figure said disassembling each robot would have occupied its technical staff long enough to delay F.04, a tradeoff that says as much about the company's roadmap velocity as its IP concerns. In a startup where the next launch matters more than the last product's salvage value, the furnace won.
The foundry footage also carries a quieter technical claim. Electromagnetic interference around a 75-ton arc furnace is hostile to conventional electronics, yet Figure reports its robots' onboard policies ran seamlessly throughout, even as the film crew's equipment failed. Whatever else the event was, it functioned as an extreme-environment stress test that no lab simulation would have provided — and the robots, unlike the cameras, came through it until the moment they leapt.
F.02 is gone now, remembered at BMW, in warehouses and on household chores. A few robots remain in storage at headquarters as museum pieces. The rest of the fleet lives on as a numbered series of steel artifacts — a fitting end for a robot whose job was to prove humanoids could work, and whose send-off proved they could, briefly, fly.
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