The furnace story Figure didn't finish

Vertical integration was supposed to be the humanoid industry's safest bet. Hyundai and SoftBank just hedged it.

Figure made the case in February 2025 by ending its OpenAI deal and moving to in-house AI. CEO Brett Adcock argued that robot intelligence could not be outsourced any more than hardware could. Tesla’s model is also self-contained. Their logic is straightforward: own the body, own the brain, put the machine in your factories, and every piece gets better together.

Then look at Hyundai. In July, Hyundai said its shareholders were pursuing SoftBank’s remaining 9.65% Boston Dynamics stake after SoftBank exercised a contractual right to sell it. The move would take Hyundai from 90.35% ownership to full ownership. In September, The Robot Report reported that Boston Dynamics had opened the Robotics Metaplant Application Center, or RMAC, inside Hyundai’s Georgia factory, where Atlas is being trained on manufacturing tasks. Those are integration-friendly moves. But in the same year, The Robot Report again reported that SoftBank had agreed to acquire the Robotics and AI Institute (RAI), the research lab founded by Marc Raibert and seeded by Hyundai. Put these two next to each other and the full picture is that Hyundai is tightening its grip on the robot while loosening it on the lab meant to push robot intelligence forward.

Maybe that is smarter than owning everything and a division of labour makes sense for them. Hyundai gets the machine, factory and deployment loop; SoftBank gets the research institution. AI research may benefit from sitting outside Boston Dynamics' product organization. Hyundai has also used outside AI partners, so this is not proof it has abandoned partnerships.

But SoftBank is a strange company to hold up for that bet. Reuters reported that SoftBank stopped producing Pepper in 2020 after it struggled to find a customer base. SoftBank sold control of Boston Dynamics to Hyundai after owning it from 2017 to 2021. It has since built a robotics-and-automation portfolio, including the planned acquisition of ABB Robotics for $5.375 billion. SoftBank and ABB say that deal is targeted for completion in the second half of 2026. Its strength is buying pieces. Its track record of turning those pieces into durable robotics products is harder to point to.

I looked for a SoftBank robotics acquisition that actually shipped a product people use, and I came up empty. Pepper is dead, Boston Dynamics produced demo videos of Atlas under SoftBank for four years, and the ABB deal hasn't even closed. Hyundai didn't just split the lab from the robot. It handed robot intelligence to the company best known for buying robotics firms and watching them stall.

Figure spent most of its decommissioning post explaining what it wanted to protect. Not what it needed to dispose of.

On November 19, 2025, Figure announced that its F.02 robots were retiring after an 11-month deployment at BMW’s Spartanburg plant. Figure said the robots were returning to headquarters. Ten and a half months later, on September 30, 2026, it showed what happened next: most of the F.02 fleet went into a furnace, Terminator-style. Figure’s stated reason was protection of intellectual property, meaning its proprietary designs and know-how. Taking apart robots packed with custom actuators and other proprietary hardware would consume engineering time and delay F.04, Figure said.

The approach sounds disciplined, except every U.S. and Mexican foundry Figure contacted refused to accept a robot with its lithium-ion batteries still inside. It eventually found a foundry in Finland willing to do it. The official post tells us the battery was a disposal problem. It does not tell us what happened to the battery eventually. Figure is now selling $500 and $1,900 collectibles, forged from the melt.

I found a piece The Robot Report published ten days earlier by Robert Belt, a robotics-recycling consultant working with Re-Teck. His list of problems is harder to turn into a marketing film. Lithium-ion cells can trigger thermal runaway, an uncontrolled heating reaction, if they are punctured or crushed. A humanoid can contain 3.5 to 4 kilograms of strong rare-earth neodymium magnets, according to Belt. Conventional crushing can contaminate those magnets with other materials and make them unrecoverable. The machines can also retain sensitive information, including "proprietary navigation maps, biometric logs, facial recognition recordings, and behavioral patterns". Belt argues that the stored information needs to be deliberately sanitised or destroyed before the hardware is repurposed or recycled.

Figure’s own account tells us it knew at least one of these problems existed, but stays silent on the other two. It is possible that the batteries were safely removed, every storage device was wiped and magnets recovered before the furnace run. We do not know, because the company chose to explain the proprietary-hardware problem in detail while leaving the battery, data and material-recovery questions unanswered.

That is not an accusation of wrongdoing. It is a reminder that a humanoid company’s idea of responsible retirement may not be the same thing as a recycling consultant's.

Both pieces this week end on an outside check, not the company's own account. SoftBank's actual track record (Pepper, a dormant Boston Dynamics, an ABB deal that hasn't closed) is what undercuts Hyundai's bet on it, not anything Hyundai said. And a recycling consultant's list of real end-of-life problems is what undercuts Figure's account of its furnace, not anything Figure admitted. Neither company lied. They just hadn't planned on someone outside checking what they left out.