Figure AI has chosen a farewell worthy of Terminator for your humanoid robots F.02 for which he has had the collaboration of his own Arnold Schwarzenegger. The American company has destroyed a good part of this generation of machines making them jump into a tank of molten steel in Finlandjust as it happened in Terminator 2 at the end of the movie.
The F.02 is the second-generation humanoid robot that Figure introduced in August 2024 to perform physical work. Its commercial use focused on agreements with companies such as bmwbut without becoming a product for sale to the public. In November of last year, Figure announced his retirement after an eleven-month deployment at the BMW factory from Spartanburg, in the United States. There he worked placing sheet metal pieces for later welding. and contributed to manufacturing more than 30,000 vehiclesaccording to the company.
The expansion of the robot fleet F.03 It complicated the maintenance of the previous model, but getting rid of it posed another problem. Its custom-designed mechanisms and components incorporated intellectual property that Figure did not want to expose, while disassembling each unit would have occupied the company’s technical staff until delaying the launch of the future F.04.
You should melt them.
— Arnold Schwarzenegger (@Schwarzenegger) August 19, 2026
Figure asked on the internet what he could do with robots and Schwarzenegger responded by proposing that he melt them down.. Figure then contacted the actor, who wanted to get involved in the project and collaborated with the company and its filming team on the video that documents the operation, according to the manufacturer.
The search for a foundry willing to accept the order turned out to be more complicated than expected. The facilities consulted in the United States and Mexico They rejected melting robots with lithium-ion batteriesand Figure even turned to former members of the show Mythbusters to find alternatives.
Finally, a foundry Imatra in Finland he agreed to carry out the operation and engineers prepared the jumps in California. They installed large air mattresses at the San José headquarters and began training the F.02s to launch from the second floor of a building.
When push came to shove, the team had 24 hours to make the jumps, taking advantage of the six rounds in which the furnace melted scrap steel. In each one they had about twenty minutes before the steel crustedwhile heat and electromagnetic fields caused cameras and other electronic devices to fail.
Despite these extreme conditions, the robots executed the learned movements. The recovered metal returned to the United States to be made into limited edition commemorative objects, and only a few F.02 units remain in storage at headquarters. The company has not specified how many robots it melted down in Imatra.
Its replacement is the F.03, presented in October 2025 and designed for housework. It incorporates renewed hands and sensors to helixFigure’s AI that combines vision, language and action, plus soft coatings, wireless charging and improvements in battery safety.