“ It's cheaper to get rid of a robot than sell it!
On September 30, 2026, Figure AI released a short film titled F.02 Decommissioning. The company's second-generation robotic F.02 was shipped to the eastern Finnish town of Imatra, where it completed its final action of jumping into steel water before a 75-ton arc furnace.
Arnold Schwarzenegger, wearing a full suit of protective gear, stood next to him and left the words "Hasta la vista, F.02".
Outside the picture, Figure is actually solving a very real problem: warehouses are stacking up.
In August, founder Brett Adcock posted on social media that F.02 was a good machine, but the company didn't have a place to put it, asking netizens how to send it.
The official reason given is that the F.02 is loaded with proprietary hardware such as customizers, and the time it takes an overhead engineer to dismantle it will slow the F.04's progress.
A company would rather put the entire team in the boiler, not dismantle, not auction, not turn over, this choice behind the bill is worth more than the short film itself.
01.
If you have a small rare earth mine, why not demolish it?
F.02 worked for eleven months at the BMW plant in Bamstadt, moving more than 90,000 parts and participating in the production of more than 30,000 X3s.
According to its demolition estimate, a standard humanoid robot has 10 to 150,000 parts, 200 to 500 major subcomponents, 20 to 40 motors, 1,000 to 3,000 special fasteners. The most valuable of these are 3.5 to 4 kg of aluminum permanent magnets, all in the joint machine. According to Re-Teck, each decommissioned humanoid robot has a small rare earth mine buried in its body.
The problem is that the mine cannot be excavated. The usual practice of electronic recycling is to crush and separate the entire car, where the magnets can be crushed and mixed with zinc, zinc, and carbon fibers to contaminate each other, eventually becoming a stack of unused mixed waste.
Artificial demolition is another problem for Figure: demolishing means exposing all internal structures, which is exactly what it doesn't want to happen.
So it took the cleanest route. This step didn't even land: U.S. and Mexican smelting plants heard that a man-made robot equipped with lithium batteries would jump into their own furnace and all refused.
After water-cooled steel castings were shipped back to the United States, a limited collection of F.02 was being processed for sale. Officials said only a small quantity, quantity and price were not disclosed.
There's another layer that Figure doesn't mention. As long as there's a previous generation of robots on the market that can run normally, customers have an existing reference when talking about the price of the F.03. After the fleet lost most of it, this reference has largely disappeared. For a company that is preparing to launch new products, the profits from destroying the old machine are more than confidential.
02.
"Jumping into steel water on your own" proves what?
At the San Jose headquarters, engineers set up a giant gas chamber downstairs that allowed robots to jump up and down from the second floor over and over again. To make the action more similar, they sought professional actors for reference, and trained a new model in a simulation environment with the goal of getting a robot that has never entered the factory to jump in and find its own location.
The conditions on the other side of Finland were much harsher than on the training ground. The three graphite electrodes powered the 75-litre arc furnace, which had a 24-hour window, six boilers of steel water, and only about 20 minutes to freeze from the steel to the surface. The high temperatures on the ground caused the cameras and other electronics to fail continuously.
It's hard to see how this moves, to see what can be done.
In the same year, media reported that Figure's Helix 2.5 was used in 30 unfamiliar homes to clean beds, towels, and toys, and had 237 successful trials, with a 56% success rate. This is not the official figure for Figure, but Adcock himself has said that this version has not yet been able to function independently in any unfamiliar family in the long term.
56% of respondents compared the contradiction with "no-fly operation" as a measure of both.
The water jump is a one-time event, the jump is a waste of iron, without images, and no one will know how many failed that day. It naturally does not produce a divider.
Figure does not reveal the success rate of the jump, the number of re-tests, or how many moves were corrected in real time by the on-board sensors after the jump, or how many were predicted in a timely manner. These numbers are missing, and "seamless operation" can only be expressed as a manufacturer's statement, regardless of verifiable conclusions.
A goal point is clear, the termination conditions are clear, the jump task can be repeatedly practiced in a simulation, and the difficulty is not the same as an operation task to deal with soft, deformed, and placed in a near-infinite state in a strange room.
Business cards are on the bottom line, but it doesn't mean that the production line will slow down. Machines are still going on sale, still going to factories and warehouses. Every one that goes down the production line today will have to face the same question sooner or later: which way to go on retirement day.
03.
Is the fire burning in exchange for China?
Figure The operation can be carried out on the condition that it disposes of its own assets, which are located far away in Finland.
The system on the Chinese side is moving in the opposite direction. On March 1, the revised HJ 527 HJ 2026, which covers waste electrical equipment storage, dismantling, product utilization and disposal of the entire process of pollution control requirements, and explicitly expands the coverage of the management objects.
Both regulations did not directly impact humanoid robots: a disposable electrical electronics and a battery-powered car. But they drew on the system's long history of coding, tracing, flow-to-check, and producer responsibility. Human robots carry batteries, storage, and rare earths, and are likely to be incorporated into this framework until they become obsolete.
And the way that Figure encountered Can, with this idea, would be even more difficult. When it was looking for a foundry in the United States and Mexico, the reason it was rejected was because of the lithium batteries in the body. The batteries had to be encoded, flowed and checked, and the whole machine was connected to the stove with the batteries.
The same is true of rare earths. 3.5 to 4 kilograms of nickel in the joint motor, China is the world's leading manufacturer and processor of rare earth permanent magnets.
The price of the new machine is still going down. According to the book of bids of Yuke's Tech, the one-time price of its human-shaped robot decreased from yuan 59,340,000 in 2023 to yuan 26,070,000 in 2024, further falling to yuan 16,760,000 in the first three quarters of 2025, while the gross operating profit for the same period increased from 44.22% to 60.13%.
Figure sends a team of machines away with a boiler. The more likely route for the future on the Chinese side is to dismantle, trace, and re-manufacture.
04.
Why does this company have to declare "it's true"?
At the end of the announcement, Figure adds a special sentence: "At a time when AI generates images in abundance, it is necessary to make it clear that they really trained robots to jump autonomously, really transported them to Finland, and really made them jump into steel water".
A company has to declare "it's true" specifically for its video, which in itself illustrates the problem.
It's not hard to guess. An image of a robot jumping into steel water, using generating tools to make an image-like version in a few hours, is sent out, and the transfer volume is probably higher than it really is.
On September 28, Adcock first sent out a trailer that actually labeled "Made with AI" as being made by AI, but labeled.
Some reports on Chinese platforms add to F.02's unofficial experience: that it passed the UL 1748 safety certification, that it spent half a year as a bilingual instructor at Tokyo Haneda Airport, that it sorted 37 million packages at Amazon warehouses, including weight (42 kg of special alloys) and batteries (3 high-energy-density solid-state lithium batteries).
An international tech news reaches a Chinese-language platform, often with several layers of translations in the middle, each of which may be rewritten by a generated tool, without the reader seeing any markings.
One is made by AI, labeled; one is authentic, declared; more are AI-compiled, unlabeled.
The same machine, an asset that must be destroyed on Figure's books, left an unmistakable success rate on the capability coordinate, a pile of rare earths and batteries that must be dismantled in the framework of the system, and in propagation, it becomes another robot that never existed.
Most of the F.02's fleet is gone, with a few remaining at the headquarters. The robots that are currently on a downline in China, depending on the status of the retirement, depending on the day of retirement, are a dismantling line or a boiler.