Figure melts its retired Figure 02 humanoids in Finland to keep their actuators secret

Somebody at Figure had to contact metal foundries in the US and Mexico and ask whether a humanoid robot could jump, battery packs and all, into their melt. "None of the metal foundries we contacted in the US and Mexico would let us jump a robot with lithium-ion batteries into their expensive equipment," the company wrote in its blog post ^[2]. One steel foundry, in Imatra, Finland, volunteered ^[3].

Figure's case for destruction is about intellectual property. Its post said the Figure 02 robots were no longer maintainable and that it would destroy them to keep their "custom-built actuators and other intellectual property" from leaking ^[1]. According to Dexerto's account, Figure said protecting that hardware ruled out ordinary disposal, and that dismantling each robot would take engineers away from Figure 04 ^[5][4]. Getting the batteries out would, I'd expect, mean opening every machine, the same per-unit work Figure said it could not spare engineers for.

So Figure taught the robots to jump. It trained them in simulation to leap off cliffs ^[6], then on airbags at its San Jose campus, with stunt performers' movements as the reference ^[7]. Figure says the robots then jumped into the molten steel autonomously ^[9]. A 75-ton electric arc furnace finished the job within 24 hours and six melts ^[8], an average of about four hours a melt ^[1].

Hardware teams tend to treat retirement as a back-office task for whoever owns compliance. Figure ran it as a product release, with a film and a price list. Arnold Schwarzenegger tweeted "You should melt them" to chief executive Brett Adcock ^[12], after the company asked the internet how to retire the fleet, according to its September 30 announcement ^[13]. He appears in the F.02 Decommission film ^[14]. The remains are being cast into preorder bars priced from $500 to $1,900, and the top tier has sold out ^[10]. A few robots were kept at headquarters ^[11]. Neither report describes a resale or parts-recovery plan, or gives the size of the fleet.

The stated reason and the work done do not line up neatly. The jump training was engineering time, spent on a fleet Figure called unmaintainable, by a company that said it could not spare engineers to take the robots apart ^[1][4]. "We really trained robots to jump autonomously, shipped them to Finland, and had them leap into a vat of molten steel," Figure wrote ^[15].

For a team shipping proprietary hardware, the forcing test is whether it can name, before launch, a facility that will accept a whole dead unit. Two axes sort the answer. One is whether a retired unit still holds design value a competitor could extract. The other is whether its battery comes out without a teardown. If the unit holds little design value and the battery comes out easily, resale or standard recycling works. Little value but a hard-to-reach battery means budgeting the teardown, because nothing inside needs guarding. Valuable parts with an accessible battery let a team pull the packs first, removing the objection the US and Mexican foundries raised ^[2]. Figure sat in the last box, with valuable parts and no appetite for teardown, and the only foundry that said yes was in Finland ^[3].