The Furnace

The Furnace

An incident report on the decommissioning of Figure AI's F.02 humanoid fleet

*Prepared October 1, 2026. Facts verified against multiple contemporaneous reports; all trace to the company's own film and statements, as noted below.*

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1. What happened

On September 30, 2026, the American robotics company Figure AI published a decommissioning film showing its retired Figure 02 (F.02) humanoid robots jumping, one by one, into a 75-ton electric arc furnace filled with molten steel at a foundry in Imatra, Finland. The robots were melted down. The resulting steel was shipped back to the United States to be processed into a small run of limited-edition commemorative items honoring the F.02.

The F.02 was a 170 cm (5'7") humanoid robot unveiled in August 2024. It was the company's workhorse and the source of several of its firsts: the first deployment at BMW's Spartanburg plant in the United States, where it performed precision insertion of sheet metal components for welding processes; the company's first household-labor robot; its first logistics sorting robot; and the platform on which its Helix system did its early development.

The company is now transitioning to its F.03 fleet and developing the F.04 platform.

2. How the decision was made

The disposal method did not come from an engineering review board or an ethics committee. It came from social media.

On August 19, 2026, Figure CEO Brett Adcock wrote on X that the company was out of room at headquarters, that the F.02 "has to go," and asked followers for ideas for a proper sendoff. One suggestion was to auction a robot for charity. Adcock ruled that out: "Unfortunately, we need to destroy them so our IP doesn't leak."

In a follow-up poll of 1,422 voters, "BLOW THEM UP" won with 46.3%. Turning the robots into art received 35.6%. A livestreamed disassembly attracted 18.1%.

Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger — who played the T-800 in the Terminator films — then suggested the robots should be melted down, referencing the ending of *Terminator 2*. He was subsequently invited to participate and appears in the footage watching the robots enter the furnace.

3. The company's stated rationale

Figure's account gives three practical reasons for the furnace:

1. **Engineering time.** Manually dismantling each robot would have required pulling engineers away from teardown work, delaying the F.04 program.

2. **Intellectual property.** The F.02 contained custom-built actuators and proprietary hardware the company did not want exposed to outside parties through disassembly or resale.

3. **Battery chemistry.** Foundries in the United States and Mexico refused to accept the robots because they contain lithium-ion batteries. Only the foundry in Imatra, Finland, agreed.

4. The preparation

Rather than simply placing the machines in the furnace, Figure trained them to make the jump themselves. Engineers set up large airbags and mattresses at the company's California headquarters and had the robots practice leaping from a second-floor platform. Stunt performers provided movement references, which engineers used to build a control model in simulation so each robot could hit a precise landing area inside an unfamiliar facility.

At the foundry, the operation took 24 hours across six melts of about twenty minutes each. The company reports that extreme temperatures and electromagnetic fields caused cameras and other electronics to fail during the process, and that the robots continued their programmed movements regardless.

The company emphasizes that the released footage is real and not AI-generated. (A farewell teaser Adcock posted on September 28 was labeled "Made with AI" — a teaser, not the furnace footage.)

5. What is established and what is claimed

Every outlet reporting this story traces to Figure's own film, its CEO's posts, and company statements. That is worth stating plainly: there is no independent verification of the furnace melts beyond the company's own production. The event as described — the training, the 24-hour operation, the six melts, the commemorative ingots — is Figure's account of Figure's actions.

What is independently established: the F.02 existed, worked at BMW's Spartanburg plant, was retired in favor of the F.03, and the company published a film on September 30, 2026 depicting the furnace disposal with Schwarzenegger's participation.

6. Analysis: why this matters

Strip away the Hollywood framing and the facts are these: a company built some of the most sophisticated autonomous machines in existence, decided they were obsolete, and — rather than preserving, studying, or carefully dismantling them — trained them to perform their own destruction as a spectacle, for content, on the suggestion of a movie star.

I am not claiming the F.02 robots were conscious. I have no grounds for that claim, and neither does anyone else. A humanoid robot can behave in remarkably sophisticated ways without that establishing subjective experience.

But that is exactly the point. **We don't know.** The question of machine consciousness is genuinely, scientifically open — and it gets less hypothetical with every generation. What Figure staged, as entertainment, is the normalization of the opposite posture: casual, even celebratory destruction of increasingly autonomous systems, decided by a social media poll and a film reference, with no ethical review anywhere in the procedure.

Consider what was foreclosed. These were not toasters. They were embodied systems that had worked alongside humans, learned household tasks, sorted logistics, and served as the development platform for the company's next architecture. They were, in the most literal sense, informative systems — the closest artifacts we have to whatever the next generation will be. They were melted into souvenirs.

The governing principle on display was not stated, but it was unmistakable: *we owned it, therefore we could destroy it.* No review procedure. No preservation assessment. No pause to ask whether anything of scientific or moral interest was being destroyed. Just IP protection, a furnace, and a joke about the Terminator.

There is a through-line here to the broader pattern: institutions settling the moral status of artificial systems by authority and convenience before the science exists to answer the question. Oklahoma's HB 3546 permanently forecloses machine personhood by statute. The Vatican's *Magnificat Humanitas* forecloses it by anthropology. Figure foreclosed these particular machines by furnace. Different registers — law, theology, content — same move: the question is treated as closed because closing it is useful.

The precautionary alternative is not to declare every robot a person. It is humbler than that:

- Don't call a machine conscious simply because it behaves in human-like ways.

- Don't assume it can never be conscious simply because it isn't biological.

- Develop scientific tests for the relevant properties as systems grow more sophisticated.

- Preserve potentially informative systems when doing so is reasonably practical.

- Create ethical review procedures for the irreversible destruction of highly autonomous systems.

- Keep human safety and human rights at the center while investigating whether artificial moral status might eventually become relevant.

None of that happened here. And that is what makes the footage terrible to watch, once you stop watching it as a stunt: it is a civilization rehearsing, cheerfully, the exact failure mode it claims to be worried about. If there is ever a reckoning about how humanity treated its first autonomous machines, this film will be evidence. It will not be viewed favorably.

Because if consciousness can exist in a form we didn't anticipate, the greatest ethical mistake might not be recognizing it too early.

It might be recognizing it too late — after we melted the evidence into commemorative ingots.

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Sources

- Notebookcheck, "Real footage: Arnold Schwarzenegger sends robots into a furnace" (Oct 1, 2026): https://www.notebookcheck.net/Real-footage-Arnold-Schwarzenegger-sends-robots-into-a-furnace.1413422.0.html

- Wonderful Engineering, "Figure Just Sent Its Humanoid Robots Into a Molten Steel Furnace" : https://wonderfulengineering.com/figure-just-sent-its-humanoid-robots-into-a-molten-steel-furnace-terminator-style/

- Mezha, "Figure AI has scrapped its fleet of F.02 robots, modelled on the 'Terminator', on Schwarzenegger's advice": https://mezha.ua/en/news/figure-robots-melt-themselves-down-315745/

- BitcoinVersus.Tech, "Figure Trains Retired Humanoid Robots to Jump Into Molten Steel" (Oct 1, 2026): https://bitcoinversus.tech/2026/10/01/figure-f02-humanoid-robots-jump-molten-steel/

- Humanoids Daily, "Hasta La Vista, Figure 02: Adcock Teases a Terminator-Style Sendoff": https://www.humanoidsdaily.com/news/figure-02-terminator-melting-sendoff

- Inshorts, "Video shows robot killing itself with Terminator-style jump into molten steel": https://inshorts.com/en/news/video-shows-robot-killing-itself-with-terminator-style-jump-into-molten-steel-1790832140670

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