A complaint involving Figure AI, the one that has robots that have even already retired, breaks that distance and places the debate where it should always be, on the concrete physical strength of these machines. According to a lawsuit filed in California, the company's former head of product safety, Robert Gruendel, claims to have been fired days after alerting management that Figure's robots were capable of causing serious injuries.
He recounted an episode in which a glitch caused one of the humanoids to cut 6mm into the steel door of a refrigerator, a blow strong enough he claimed to crush a human skull. However, the allegations were disputed by the company. In a statement to CNBC, a spokesperson said that Robert Gruendel was fired for poor performance and that all of his claims are false, promising to refute them in court.
The lawsuit requests compensation and a conspiracy trial, for the whistleblower's lawyer, California law protects employees who point out security risks, which would place the case among the first involving humanoids. Robert Gruendel says his concern is central to the company's accelerated approach to the market, which he says would neglect essential safeguards.
The accusations arise at a time when Figure is experiencing a meteoric rise, that growth would have expanded scrutiny on how much security procedures accompany the speed of advances, the case raises an alert in a sector that until now focused its fears on software AI while neglecting the direct impact of physically machines
powerful.
The history of robotics has already recorded fatal accidents, such as the widely reported case in a Volkswagen factory in 2015 and one of the first incidents in Japan still in 1981, more recently, a Tesla engineer was attacked by a defective robotic arm in the Austin gigafactory and an episode that made headlines due to the level of violence of the machine.
As humanoids evolve and begin to occupy human spaces, the lawsuit against Figure transforms a theoretical concern into a concrete confrontation.
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