Figure AI Sent Its Retired F.02 Humanoid Robots Jumping Into Molten Steel in Finland

There are not many ways to retire a robot. Most get shelved, stripped for parts, or quietly powered down in a warehouse somewhere. Figure AI had other ideas.

The US robotics company published behind-the-scenes footage on 30 September 2026 showing its F.02 humanoid robots — an earlier model now being phased out — autonomously jumping into a vat of molten steel at a foundry in Imatra, Finland. The footage was posted by the official Figure account on X, alongside a detailed account of how the whole thing was pulled off.

And yes, the Terminator 2 comparisons wrote themselves.

Training Robots to Jump Into Fire — Literally

Figure AI said the F.02 units were trained at the company’s campus in San Jose, California, long before they ever saw the inside of a Finnish steelworks. The training involved large airbags and practice jumps from the second floor of a building. Stunt artists’ movements were used as a reference point — which is not something you read in a robotics press release every day.

The jump itself was trained in simulation, meaning the robots learned the movement in a virtual environment rather than at the actual foundry. This approach, known in engineering as sim-to-real transfer, is designed to let a robot perform a task in an unfamiliar real-world location without having practised there directly. The idea is that if the simulation is accurate enough, the robot’s behaviour should hold up when conditions change.

Whether it works in practice is another matter. But Figure AI says it did.

Twenty Minutes, Six Melts, One Chance

The team had just 24 hours at the Imatra foundry. During that window, they worked across six furnace melts. Each melt gave them roughly 20 minutes of usable time before the surface of the molten steel began to form a solid crust — closing the window for the jump. Those figures come from Figure AI directly and have not been independently confirmed by Finnish officials or the foundry operator, whose identity has not been publicly named.

For their part, the furnace itself is no small piece of kit. It’s a 75-tonne electric arc furnace, powered by three graphite electrodes, used to melt steel scrap. The environment inside is extreme — intense heat, molten metal, and strong electromagnetic fields that can interfere with electronics. Figure AI said the robots maintained their AI control systems despite those conditions.

Brett Adcock, Figure AI’s founder and chief executive, has previously spoken publicly about the company’s ambition to deploy humanoid robots in industrial settings. The decommissioning footage was framed as a demonstration of what the F.02 generation had achieved, rather than a stunt for its own sake.

What the Footage Actually Shows — and What It Doesn’t

Figure AI was explicit that the footage is not AI-generated. The robots physically travelled to Finland and performed the jumps without remote human control at the moment of the leap. That’s the claim, and it’s worth taking seriously — but also worth keeping in perspective.

This was a narrow, highly controlled demonstration of one specific movement, in one specific environment, with a team on site and a tightly managed time window. It is not evidence that humanoid robots can safely carry out general industrial work. No independent safety assessment of the exercise has been published, and the available material doesn’t detail the full risk controls, supervision arrangements, or authorisation processes that were in place at the foundry.

The safety considerations around electric arc furnaces are serious. Extreme temperatures, molten metal splatter, electrical hazards, and electromagnetic interference all present real risks to workers and equipment. No workers were reported as injured during the exercise, but the full picture of how the site was managed isn’t publicly available.

So while the footage is genuinely striking, it’s a proof-of-concept for sim-to-real transfer in a dramatic setting — not a blueprint for routine industrial deployment.

The Bigger Picture for Humanoid Robotics

The F.02 decommissioning marks the end of one chapter for Figure AI, which is now developing more advanced models. The company sits within a broader industry push — alongside Boston Dynamics, Tesla’s Optimus programme, and others — to build humanoid robots capable of working in warehouses, factories, and other physical environments.

For their part, the Finland exercise is a useful data point for that ambition. Training a robot in simulation and having it perform correctly in an environment it has never visited is genuinely difficult. Doing it in a foundry, under electromagnetic stress, with a 20-minute window per attempt, adds layers of complexity that a controlled lab setting simply doesn’t replicate.

But the gap between jumping into a furnace on command and performing reliably across the full range of tasks in a real industrial workplace remains wide. The robotics field is making progress — this footage is part of that story — but the day-to-day reality of factory floors involves far more variability than a single dramatic jump.

What This Means for Kent Residents

There’s no direct impact on Kent from this particular exercise — no robots are heading to Medway’s industrial estates or Thanet’s manufacturing sites as a result. But the broader story of humanoid robotics and industrial automation is one that will eventually touch every part of the UK economy, including Kent’s advanced manufacturing and engineering sectors. For anyone studying engineering, computing, or robotics at one of Kent’s colleges or universities, the growing real-world deployment of AI-controlled robots is worth watching closely — these are the systems that will shape the jobs market over the next decade.