Figure taught its retired F.02 robots to jump into a furnace of molten steel — Arnold Schwarzenegger’s idea

The strangest robotics video of the year isn't science fiction — it's a corporate decommissioning film. Today, Figure AI released "F.02 Decomission," a short film showing the company's retired F.02 humanoid robots training for, and then executing, a final autonomous jump into a 75-ton electric arc furnace filled with molten steel at a foundry in Imatra, Finland. The footage, the company insists, is entirely real.

Hours later, the film surfaced on r/singularity, posted by u/Anen-o-me: 'The humanoid robotics company "Figure" made their older gen robots jump to their death. (Yes, they actually did this).' Within about two and a half hours the thread had 156 upvotes and 68 comments — and the top of the thread did something the internet rarely does: it checked the story instead of tearing it apart.

The film: a eulogy that ends in a furnace#

Figure's film is, on its face, a love letter. The description on the company's official upload reads: "We love Figure 02. It is an incredible robot." The F.02 marked a string of firsts: the first deployment at BMW, the birth of Helix, the first robot doing household chores, and the first logistics deployment.

But fleets age. "As our F.03 fleet grows, maintaining the F.02 fleet no longer makes sense," the description continues — and then comes the problem statement that makes this story more than a stunt. Decommissioning robots packed with custom actuators and proprietary IP is, in Figure's words, "no easy task" — disassembling each machine by hand would eat so much engineering time it would delay the next-generation F.04.

So the company says it asked the internet what to do. "The resounding answer came from an unlikely source: Arnold Schwarzenegger, who told us to melt them." Schwarzenegger appears in the finished film — the man who once played the machine now plays the executioner, Terminator-style.

Training a robot for its final leap#

The jump was an engineering project in its own right. Figure's engineers installed large airbags at the company's San Jose facility and trained the F.02 units to leap from a raised platform, using movements performed by human stunt artists as reference, per Notebookcheck's account. A specially trained AI model handled precision landing — and, the company says, that is exactly what happened in Finland.

Figure is emphatic that none of this is CGI: the machines arcing through the air are physical F.02 robots, transported to the foundry and filmed on location. The company hasn't said how many units were melted, only that most of the F.02 fleet is now gone.

Why melting beats dismantling#

This is where the stunt becomes a case study. Humanoid hardware now iterates at near consumer-electronics speed — and that acceleration has an unglamorous tail end: what do you do with an expensive, highly proprietary machine the moment it becomes obsolete?

Figure's answer is extreme, but the constraints behind it are real:

• Intellectual property. Each F.02 is full of custom actuators and proprietary components the company does not want disassembled or left intact.
• Engineering time. Hand-dismantling the fleet would pull technical staff off the F.04 program — the next generation the company actually needs to ship.
• Chemistry. Foundries in the US and Mexico reportedly declined the job over the robots' lithium-ion batteries; the Finnish foundry said yes, per Wonderful Engineering.

The metal didn't stay in Finland. The melted robots were cast into bars, shipped back to the US, and are being made into a small run of limited-edition commemorative items honoring the F.02 — the machine, melted down and reborn as merchandise.

Reddit's verdict: real, ridiculous, and a little sad#

The thread's highest-signal moment came early: u/SweatyRussian opened with "Proof?" — then edited the comment: "Edit: it's real," linking the Notebookcheck writeup. u/mythormedicine shared Figure's official YouTube upload: "the actual video has this exact scene !! and more."

With authenticity settled, the thread turned to tone. The jokes wrote themselves — u/RanklesTheOtter's giphy-captioned plea, "Dear future machines, we Singularity bros did not have anything to do with this" — but the sharper comments pushed back on the framing. "These robots are not 'dying.' They're being recycled, albeit poorly," wrote u/noiseguy76. u/terrarialord201 put it more coldly: to a digital being, being scrapped is "like throwing out an old hand drill for a power drill." And u/Denial_Jackson winced at the waste: "Such a waste."

Figure's own language invites the ambivalence: the film is titled like a memorial and narrated like an obituary — "We love Figure 02" — for machines the company deliberately destroyed. The robots aren't people, and nobody in the thread claims otherwise. But a company filming a eulogy for hardware it then melts has invented, at minimum, a new genre of product marketing.

What to watch#

• The F.04 clock. Figure says dismantling the F.02s would have delayed F.04. The furnace buy-back only makes sense if F.04 ships on a timeline that justifies it.
• The disposal precedent. Tesla's Optimus, Unitree's line, and every other humanoid maker racing through hardware generations will face the same question — proprietary machines, lithium batteries, and nowhere cheap to put them. Figure just set the most dramatic possible example.
• Spectacle as strategy. Figure has a habit of turning engineering into theater. If the decommission film is any indication, the F.04 launch will not be a press release.

For more on the humanoid race, see our coverage of Boston Dynamics' new hands for Atlas and GPT-6 Astra piloting a Unitree G1.

Sources: Figure's official film "F.02 Decomission" on YouTube; Notebookcheck, BitcoinVersus, and Wonderful Engineering coverage; and the discussion thread posted by u/Anen-o-me on r/singularity. The editorial illustrations are AI-generated.