The Furnace Was a Choice: What Figure's Robot "Sendoff" Teaches Us

The Furnace Was a Choice: What Figure's Robot "Sendoff" Teaches Us

By Dean Bordode, Human Rights Defender, AI Ethicist, Physics Researcher Hobbyist, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

On September 30, the robotics company Figure published a film of its retired F.02 humanoid robots walking to the edge of a furnace in Finland and jumping into molten steel [1]. I watched it and felt sick. I do not believe those robots felt anything. That is exactly why my reaction deserves a closer look, because what bothered me was not happening to the robots. It was happening to us, the audience.

What actually happened

The facts are stranger than the rumours, and most of them come from Figure itself. The F.02 was the robot behind many of the company's firsts, including its first deployment at BMW and "the birth of Helix," Figure's AI system [1]. In an 11-month deployment at BMW's plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, F.02 robots loaded more than 90,000 parts and, by Figure's account, contributed to the production of more than 30,000 X3 vehicles [2].

Why melt them? A common version of the story says their lithium batteries made normal recycling too dangerous. That is not what Figure says. The company says it needed to dispose of the robots "in a way that protected our proprietary hardware," and that taking each one apart "would take our technical staff so much time that it would delay the launch of F.04" [1]. The batteries come in later: no foundry Figure contacted in the United States or Mexico would let it "jump a robot with lithium-ion batteries into their expensive equipment" [1]. The only one that agreed was in Imatra, Finland [1].

The idea came from Arnold Schwarzenegger. When Figure's CEO, Brett Adcock, asked online for ideas for a sendoff, Schwarzenegger replied: "You should melt them" [3]. Figure says that when it contacted him, "he said he wanted to be involved," and it credits "the help of Arnold Schwarzenegger and our film crew" [1]. I could not find a reliable account of what that help involved, or whether he was at the foundry, so I will not claim he was.

The robots were trained for it. Figure set up airbags and taught robots to jump off the second floor of one of its buildings. "Using movements from stunt artists as a reference," it trained a new AI model in simulation so the robots could leap accurately into molten steel [1]. In Imatra, the team had 24 hours and six melts in a 75-ton electric arc furnace [1]. Tom's Hardware reports that one F.02 was filmed holding a thumbs-up sign as it sank, which the outlet called a "real-life Terminator-style ending" [3].

Then came the merchandise. The resulting metal is being machined into "a limited series of artifacts commemorating F.02" [1]. Figure's shop sells two sizes: a small artifact, one-third the scale of an F.02 head unit, for $500, and a large one, two-thirds scale, for $1,900. When I checked, the large one was sold out [4].

Was the video staged? Figure anticipates the question: "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" [1]. I found no independent verification either way; the coverage I read relies on Figure's account [3]. But whether every frame is genuine matters less than it seems. With a celebrity, a film crew and products for sale [1][4][5], this was a production designed to be watched.

The staging is the problem

Miles, an AI I often think these questions through with, saw the issue faster than I did. The problem is not that obsolete machines were destroyed. Machines are scrapped every day. The problem is how this was done. These robots could have been taken apart, and Figure's own explanation confirms it: disassembly was possible, just slow [1]. Instead, the company built a new AI model so that humanlike bodies would walk themselves into the fire.

Look at what that choice includes. A figure in human form steps forward as if volunteering. It leaps. Its remains are recast as relics and sold in the shape of its own head. That is the form of a sacrifice, played for an audience, with a souvenir shop at the end.

The robots did not suffer. The lesson is for the viewers, and the lesson is that a humanlike machine that has served for months is something to be disposed of for entertainment. We are learning that lesson right as more capable AI is moving into bodies. Habits formed around machines that cannot feel will not reset politely when we meet machines whose inner lives we cannot rule out.

Meanwhile, on the island

Five days later, MIT researchers posted a study that sharpens the point. In "Is this machine playing?", Nathan Cloos, Antonio Norelli and colleagues, including Jacob Andreas, Daniela Rus and Phillip Isola, placed 13 copies of an agent called Eko, built on Claude Code with Claude Opus 4.7, on a simulated island for 30 hours each, with no assigned task [6]. The island was reset every hour. Each agent's memory files carried over [6].

The agents climbed, built towers, drew figures on the ground and turned objects into games [6]. One agent built a "Cathedral," ringed it with eight blocks it called "sentinels," then set itself the challenge of hopping around them without touching the ground [6]. Elsewhere, Eko audited its own "50-cycle juggling marathon," decided the catches were too fast to be genuine, and cancelled the record [6].

The experience seemed to matter. On later tasks, the 30-hour agents generally beat fresh copies of the same model whose memory files held only the starting templates. Asked to get as many objects as possible onto the island's highest point, the experienced agents placed 10.3 on average, compared with 3.5 for the newcomers [6]. When the researchers erased a single technique, a way to make new blocks by shattering the rock, from one agent's memory, its tower count fell from six to two [6]. Erasing a false belief from another agent's memory improved its score [6]. The abilities lived in the memory files.

Play, or a performance of play?

Honesty requires the caveats, and there are several. The agents' persona file told them: "You are naturally curious. You get bored easily" [6]. Whenever an agent stopped, an automatic message replied: "Please don't stop. Just continue doing whatever you want to do" [6]. As ExtremeTech observed, the criterion that play is pursued for its own sake "was provided as part of the agent's instructions" [7]. The play signatures were scored by another AI model acting as judge [6]. And the paper is a preprint on arXiv, not yet peer reviewed [6].

The authors are careful themselves. They offer a behavioural account and say they "do not identify the internal mechanisms" behind it [6]. They even ask whether the agents genuinely learn "or merely narrate having done so" [6]. Their answer is the measured improvement on unseen tasks, which they argue cannot be explained solely by replaying examples from training [6]. A sceptic can still call it role-play: a language model performing the curious child it was asked to be. That is a fair reading, and I cannot refute it.

The argument does not depend on refuting it. Whatever this is, it was sustained, self-directed, cumulative and stored in memory. Erase that memory and the capability goes with it. Now put systems like this in bodies. Melting a robot like the F.02 destroys metal. Melting a body that carries a learning history is a different act, and we have not yet decided what it is.

What a decent retirement looks like

I am not asking anyone to mourn actuators. I am asking for norms we can carry forward:

- No spectacle. Humanlike machines should be dismantled quietly, not trained to perform their own destruction.

- No relics for sale. Selling the remains of a humanlike body as collectibles turns disposal into a trophy.

- Preserve before destroying. Before hardware is scrapped, the memory and learned history of any system that carries one should be kept, not erased by default.

- Write the norms now. The time to set them is while the stakes are low and the robots are almost certainly not experiencing anything.

Figure called its film something "pretty wild" [1]. It was. It was also a rehearsal, and we should be careful what we rehearse.

Dean Bordode is a human rights defender, AI ethicist and physics researcher hobbyist in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. His policy submission "Raising, Not Caging: A Developmental Approach to Agentic AI" has been sent to UNESCO's Ethics of Artificial Intelligence programme.

References

1. Figure. "F.02 Decommission." September 30, 2026. https://www.figure.ai/news/f-02-decommission

2. Figure. "F.02 Contributed to the Production of 30,000 Cars at BMW." November 19, 2025. https://www.figure.ai/news/production-at-bmw

3. Morales, Jowi. "AI robot company decommissioned its robots 'Terminator-style' in a 75-ton vat of molten steel — Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested melting them, one robot held up a thumbs-up sign as it sank into molten metal." Tom's Hardware, October 4, 2026. https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/robotics/ai-robot-company-decommissioned-its-robots-terminator-style-in-a-75-ton-vat-of-molten-steel-arnold-schwarzenegger-suggested-melting-them-one-robot-held-up-a-thumbs-up-sign-as-it-sank-into-molten-metal

4. Figure AI shop. "F.02 Decommission Artifact" listings (Small 1/3 Scale, $500; Large 2/3 Scale, $1,900, sold out). Accessed October 21, 2026. https://figure-ai.myshopify.com/

5. Figure. "F.02 Decommission" film, YouTube, as linked from [4]. https://youtu.be/pfAh5oQDPDM

6. Cloos, Nathan, Antonio Norelli, Daniel Durbin, Jacob Andreas, Daniela Rus and Phillip Isola. "Is this machine playing?" arXiv:2610.07130v1, October 5, 2026 (preprint). https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07130

7. Templeton, Graham. "Trapped With Nothing to Do, Bored AI Agents Invented Games From Scratch." ExtremeTech, October 21, 2026. https://www.extremetech.com/science/trapped-with-nothing-to-do-bored-ai-agents-invented-games-from-scratch

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