Here’s something you don’t see every day, unless you happen to watch Terminator 2: Judgement Day that much: robots diving into a pool of molten metal.
AI robotics firm Figure recently retired its fleet of Figure 02 humanoid robots. The company wrote in a blog post that the robots were no longer maintainable, and Figure had decided to destroy them completely in order to protect their “custom-built actuators and other intellectual property” from leaks. They settled on the method most famously used to dispose of the shape-shifting T-1000 robot assassin in Terminator 2 after franchise star and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger tweeted to CEO Brett Adcock that “You should melt them.”
According to Figure’s blog post, “None of the metal foundries we contacted in the US and Mexico would let us jump a robot with lithium-ion batteries into their expensive equipment.” Understandably. One steel foundry in Imatra, Finland did volunteer, and Figure began training its robots to jump off cliffs in simulation.
F.02 Decommission pic.twitter.com/NAJsRpplR8
— Figure (@Figure_robot) September 30, 2026
When taken to the facility, the robots dutifully went to their deaths without error, despite “extreme heat and electromagnetic fields.” (If it looks like the robots hesitated to jump, that’s presumably either because Figure instructed them to or they were simply calculating the right suicide trajectory.) The 75-ton electric arc furnace did the job within “just 24 hours and six melts.” Schwarzenegger made a cameo, trading a thumbs-up with one of the disintegrating robots and quipping “Hasta la vista, Figure 02.”
The company is selling preorders on metal bars made from the remains at $500-$1,900 apiece, though the more expensive memento is sold out.
“We really trained robots to jump autonomously, shipped them to Finland, and had them leap into a vat of molten steel,” Figure wrote. They sure did! Let’s hope humans aren’t next.
