According to Futurism, former Figure AI principal robotic safety engineer Robert Gruendel filed a lawsuit alleging he was fired for warning executives that the company’s robots could fracture human skulls. The suit claims Gruendel warned CEO Brett Adcock and chief engineer Kyle Edelberg in September that the Figure 02 robots generated forces “approximately more than twice the force necessary to fracture an adult human skull.” This came after impact testing showed the robots moving at “super-human speed” with impacts “twenty times higher than the threshold of pain.” Days after raising these safety concerns, Gruendel was terminated. Meanwhile, Figure AI recently secured a $39 billion valuation during a September funding round and completed an 11-month deployment of its F.02 robots at a BMW plant.
Safety Concerns Ignored
Here’s the thing that really stands out in this lawsuit – it wasn’t just one isolated complaint. Gruendel alleges a pattern of safety concerns being systematically ignored. He claims weekly safety meetings with the CEO became bi-weekly, then monthly, then quarterly. Messages about safety issues went unanswered. And get this – the suit alleges that a safety feature was removed because the chief engineer “did not like the aesthetic appearance” of it. That’s not just negligence, that’s actively making the product more dangerous for cosmetic reasons.
What’s particularly concerning is that employees apparently felt they couldn’t report safety issues through official channels. After creating an anonymous survey system, some workers instead began expressing concerns directly to Gruendel. That suggests a culture where safety reporting wasn’t being taken seriously at higher levels. When your own employees don’t trust your reporting systems, you’ve got a serious problem.
Industrial Safety Realities
Now let’s talk about the industrial context here. These aren’t robots working in isolated cages – Figure’s F.02 robots were deployed at a BMW manufacturing facility working alongside human workers. The close call where a robot punched a refrigerator, leaving a quarter-inch deep gash in stainless steel, could have been a human skull. That’s not theoretical – that’s inches away from a catastrophic workplace injury.
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Bigger Picture Concerns
This lawsuit raises much broader questions about the humanoid robotics industry’s rush to market. Figure AI’s recent $39 billion valuation shows there’s massive investor enthusiasm, but at what cost? Morgan Stanley estimates this could be a $5 trillion market by 2050, but that potential means nothing if companies are sacrificing safety for speed.
We’ve seen this pattern before with autonomous vehicles – rapid deployment despite the technology being far from perfect. But humanoid robots present unique risks because they’re designed to work directly alongside humans. Their very purpose is human interaction, which makes safety considerations even more critical. Gruendel’s attorney called this “among the first whistleblower cases related to the safety of humanoid robots,” and it probably won’t be the last.
What Happens Next
Figure AI has completely denied the allegations, telling CNBC that Gruendel was “terminated for poor performance” and that they’ll “thoroughly discredit” his claims in court. But here’s the problem – even if they’re right about the performance issues, the specific safety concerns raised in the lawsuit are too serious to ignore. That refrigerator incident alone should have triggered immediate safety reviews.
The timing couldn’t be worse for Figure, coming right after their massive funding round and high-profile BMW deployment. But honestly, maybe that’s exactly when these conversations need to happen – before these robots are in more factories and potentially in people’s homes. Because if a robot really can fracture a human skull, we need to know that before, not after, someone gets hurt.
