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Whistleblower says Figure robot gouged steel door, warns of skull-fracture risk

S2 · · Figure AI

Record

CompanyFigure AI
Categoryhumanoid
Typemalfunction
Date
Time of daynot documented
Locationno physical site (recall / fleet-wide / aggregate record)
SeverityS2 (minor injury or single-unit damage)
Scale1 unit (test malfunction)
Confidencemedium
VerificationCited source on file; not independently re-verified
SourceInteresting Engineering

What happened

Figure AI's former head of product safety filed a wrongful-termination lawsuit alleging the company's humanoid robot moved at 'super-human speed' and once carved a quarter-inch gash into a steel refrigerator door during a test malfunction, with measured impact forces he said exceeded twice the force needed to fracture an adult human skull.

Figure AI record context

Figure AI vs humanoid alternatives

humanoid context

humanoid: entries by year

482017 S1: 11172024 S1: 11242025 S1: 22025 S2: 12025 S3: 12025 S5: 48252026 S1: 12026 S3: 1226
S1S2S3S4S5

humanoid: failure modes

humanoid: most entries

malfunction context

malfunction: by category

malfunction: by year

malfunction: severity profile

Comparable malfunction events in humanoid

SevDateCompanyEvent
S12024-04Hanson RoboticsSophia the Robot Falls in Greece
S12017-07-03Boston DynamicsAtlas humanoid trips and falls off stage during live demo
S1XPeng RoboticsXPeng Iron humanoid robot falls during public debut in Shenzhen
S2UnitreeUnitree H1 humanoid flails violently and nearly injures two engineers during test
S1Agility RoboticsDigit warehouse robot collapses after 20+ hours of continuous live demo

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