Figure AI Melted Its Figure 02 Fleet in Finland. The Real Reason Is Less Dramatic.
Figure AI retired Figure 02 by teaching the robots to jump into molten steel in Finland, then sold the metal. The film is real; the reason is ordinary.
Vlad Makarovreviewed and published
Figure AI retired most of its Figure 02 humanoid fleet on 30 September, and it did not send the robots to a warehouse. It trained them to jump, on their own, into a 75-ton electric arc furnace full of molten steel at a foundry in Imatra, Finland, and filmed the result. The company published the footage as a short film, with Arnold Schwarzenegger credited as the man who suggested the idea. The spectacle is genuine. So is the far smaller reason underneath it: Figure 02 is being retired because Figure 03 is scaling up and Figure 04 is already being built.
The robot that had to go
Figure said the quiet part in its own news post. "We love Figure 02. It is an incredible robot," it wrote, listing the milestones: the company's first deployment at BMW, "the birth of Helix," its first robot doing household chores, and its first logistics deployment. Then came the sentence that explains the whole film: "As our F.03 fleet grows, maintaining the F.02 fleet no longer makes sense." A product line had reached the end of its life, and the company decided to mark the occasion rather than box it up.
Why the robots could not simply be taken apart
The obvious alternative, dismantling the fleet to recover the parts, was ruled out for a reason that has nothing to do with drama. "Decommissioning a fleet of robots full of custom-built actuators and other intellectual property is no easy task," Figure wrote. "We needed to dispose of the robots in a way that protected our proprietary hardware. Disassembling each robot would take our technical staff so much time that it would delay the launch of F.04."
Two facts sit inside that short paragraph, and both are more informative than the furnace. The first is the intellectual-property rationale: the actuators and hardware inside Figure 02 are the kind of thing a competitor would like to inspect, and melting them makes that impossible. The second is a disclosure made almost in passing. F.04 exists, it is far enough along to have a launch worth protecting, and the disposal schedule was arranged around not delaying it. A company does not usually confirm a next-generation robot inside a post about destroying the current one.
A suggestion from Arnold
The premise of the film started as an open question. "So we asked the internet: what should we do?" Figure wrote. "The resounding answer came from an unlikely source: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who told us to melt them. We reached out to Arnold, and when he said he wanted to be involved, we put everything in motion." The company links Schwarzenegger's reply to a post by founder Brett Adcock on X. A celebrity cameo is a reliable way to move a corporate cleanup from a footnote to a headline, and this one worked.
The hard part was finding someone to take the job
Almost nobody wanted the robots. No metal foundry Figure contacted in the United States or Mexico would allow a machine carrying lithium-ion batteries to be thrown into its equipment, the company says, and it "even reached out to former MythBusters to help with the search." The only willing partner was a foundry in Imatra, Finland, which meant shipping the fleet to the far side of Europe for a few seconds of footage.
The facility runs three massive graphite electrodes and a 75-ton electric arc furnace that melts solid steel scrap. The team had 24 hours on site and six melts to work with. Each melt gave them a 20-minute window before the molten steel cooled into a hard crust, closing the opening for the next jump.
| The Imatra run, as Figure describes it | |
|---|---|
| Furnace | 75-ton electric arc, three graphite electrodes |
| Time on site | 24 hours |
| Melts available | six |
| Window per melt | 20 minutes before the steel crusts over |
Training a jump it could not rehearse on site
The rehearsal happened back at Figure's campus in San Jose, using large airbags and robots being taught to jump off the second floor of a building, with movements from stunt artists used as reference. Because nobody could practise at the furnace in advance, the team trained a new AI model in simulation so the robots would land accurately in a bucket of molten steel "at a foundry we had never visited."
At the furnace, the robots ran their AI policies through extreme heat and electromagnetic fields, Figure says, "even as camera equipment and other electronics failed in this environment." That is a striking detail, and it is also the company's own account of its own production. Nobody outside Figure measured how the policies performed or confirmed that the jumps were autonomous rather than staged for the camera.
What the film is also selling
The robots did not disappear entirely. The resulting metal bars were shipped back to the United States and are being machined into "a limited series of artifacts commemorating F.02," which the company sells to the public through a Shopify storefront. The pitch turns a fleet's worth of wreckage into a compact object a customer can own. "Most of the F.02 fleet is gone," Figure notes. "Just a few remain in storage at HQ."
The company also anticipated the obvious objection. "In an age of AI-generated footage, it's worth being clear: we really trained robots to jump autonomously, shipped them to Finland, and had them leap into a vat of molten steel," it wrote. "We hope you enjoy the film." The disclaimer is well aimed, and viewers can watch the film itself, but it is worth being precise about what it does. It is a statement from the company that made the video, published on the company's own site, about the company's own film. It answers the "is this AI slop?" question; it does not independently verify the autonomy claim or the melt.
The part that is not a stunt
Away from the furnace, Figure 02 had a real operational record, and it is worth stating as background rather than as fresh news. According to BMW Group's announcement of 25 June 2026 and The Robot Report, Figure 02 supported production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles over ten months at Plant Spartanburg, inserting sheet-metal parts in the body shop. Adcock said the 11-month deployment "proved that humanoids are no longer lab experiments - they can be a valuable asset in establishing a flexible, reliable manufacturing workforce." Figure 03 will take a sequencing and logistics use case at the same plant.
That record is a fairer measure of Figure 02 than the furnace is. It is also why the film reads as a farewell rather than a pivot. The robot that goes into the steel is the one whose successor is already on the factory floor and whose replacement after that is being designed.
Why the internet cared
The film was among the top posts on r/singularity, at roughly 500 upvotes and about 180 comments, and the reaction split between people who found the imagery funny, people who found it wasteful, and people who wanted to know whether it was real. The same robot has been doing the publicity circuit all year, from sorting packages while Marc Benioff poked at it to walking the White House Cross Hall. Figure 03 has been the company's public face since the spring; the melt is where Figure 02 left the stage.
Which is the useful way to read the whole thing. A decommissioning notice became a film, the film became a merchandise line, and the merchandise line became a story about a robot dying in steel. Underneath, the parts that matter are unglamorous: a product line reaching end of life, proprietary actuators that had to be destroyed rather than resold, and a next-generation robot whose schedule could not slip. The furnace is the part you can watch. The schedule is the part that actually decided Figure 02's fate.
