Figure AI melted its fleet of Figure 02 robots on Schwarzenegger’s advice

On September 30, 2026, Figure AI announced that it had retired its fleet of Figure 02 humanoid robots and melted them down instead of disassembling them. The idea came from Arnold Schwarzenegger: he advised them to "melt them" and agreed to take part.

Disassembling the machines by hand would have taken the technicians too much time and would have delayed the release of the next generation, F.04, and the robots contain many unique actuators and other intellectual property. So the company looked for another way to get rid of the fleet. Figure's first deployment at BMW, the birth of Helix, household tasks and logistics are all tied to the F.02.

Foundries in the US and Mexico refused to let robots with lithium batteries into their expensive equipment, and even former MythBusters participants helped with the search. Only a site in Imatra, Finland, agreed.

Training began at Figure's campus in San Jose: the robots were taught to jump from the second floor of the building onto large inflatable mattresses, taking stunt performers' movements as the basis, and a new AI model was trained in simulation so that the jump into a vat of molten steel would be precise at a plant where the team had never set foot.

In Imatra, three graphite electrodes power a 75-ton arc furnace. The team had 24 hours and six melts, with 20 minutes allotted for each before the metal cooled and formed a crust. Despite the heat and electromagnetic fields, the robots ran their AI algorithms without a hitch, while cameras and other electronics failed under those conditions.

The resulting metal ingots were sent to the US, and they are now being used to make a limited series of artifacts in memory of the Figure 02. Most of the fleet is already gone; a few machines remain in a warehouse at headquarters. The company separately stresses that this is not a generated video: the robots really were taught to jump autonomously and were taken to Finland.

Translation editor: Салтанов А.