Peter Smith
⬤ Here's the thing about Figure AI's humanoid robots: they might be strong enough to crack your skull open, and the company allegedly knew it. The robotics startup is now dealing with a whistleblower lawsuit filed by Robert Gruendel, its former Head of Product Safety, who says he was fired after repeatedly flagging dangerous robot behavior that management chose to ignore.
⬤ Gruendel, a safety engineer with 20 years under his belt, joined Figure AI in 2024 thinking he'd build proper safety systems for the long haul. Instead, what he found was alarming. According to the lawsuit, early robot prototypes moved erratically around employees, sometimes coming within inches of workers and nearly clocking one person in the head. Testing showed these machines could generate forces 20 times higher than typical human pain thresholds. In one incident, a malfunctioning robot reportedly punched a stainless steel fridge door hard enough to carve a 0.25-inch gash into it. Let's be real: if it can do that to steel, imagine what it could do to a person.
⬤ The complaint goes deeper. Gruendel claims Figure AI failed to track incidents properly and actually downgraded critical safety features. The company allegedly removed certified emergency-stop equipment and rejected a physical safety component simply because an engineer didn't like how it looked. Meanwhile, Figure AI was pitching investors on an ambitious safety roadmap while raising more than $1 billion in funding. Once that money came through, the lawsuit alleges, those safety commitments got quietly scaled back. When Gruendel pushed back harder in 2025 and submitted formal complaints in August, he was fired on September 2, 2025.
⬤ Figure AI denies everything and says Gruendel was let go for poor performance, not retaliation. They're planning to fight this in court. But the lawsuit raises uncomfortable questions about the whole humanoid robotics industry. Companies are racing to put full-strength robots into homes and workplaces where regular people will interact with them, often without specialized training. When you're moving this fast and chasing massive funding rounds, safety protocols can start feeling like obstacles instead of necessities. This case could end up reshaping how robotics companies handle safety during commercial rollouts and what compliance standards actually look like when the stakes are this high.
Peter Smith
