Figure sends its retired F.02 humanoids leaping autonomously into a Finnish foundry furnace: a Terminator 2 homage whose real motive is IP-safe disposal
Figure AI gave its retired second-generation humanoid F.02 a Terminator-style send-off: with the newer F.03 fleet arrived, maintaining old units no longer made sense, and dismantling each machine would eat engineering time needed for the next-gen F.04 while risking exposure of proprietary hardware and IP. After multiple steel mills declined, only a foundry in Imatra, Finland took the job. The team rigged a large air cushion at its San Jose HQ, captured stunt-performer motion data, and trained a new AI motion model in simulation so the robots could **autonomously leap from a second floor and land precisely inside a 75-ton electric arc furnace they had never surveyed** — then be melted into steel. The company cut a 3+ minute video homaging the T-800's thumbs-up furnace scene in Terminator 2 (complete with the thumbs-up), but blogger xiaohu finds it "a bit tragic and cruel — I worry about the robots of the future seeing this." Context: before retirement the F.02 fleet spent 11 months at BMW Spartanburg — 30,000+ X3s assisted, 90,000+ sheet-metal parts loaded (84 s cycles / 37 s loads / 99%+ accuracy), 1,250+ runtime hours, ~200 miles walked, zero injuries — with those battle scars feeding directly into Figure 03's redesign (no more wrist dynamic cabling or distribution boards). Only a few F.02 units remain at HQ for display.
