Figure AI founder Brett Adcock went into detail about his $39 billion startup’s relationship with OpenAI for the first time publicly on the Shawn Ryan Podcast.
The billionaire founder brought Figure’s third-generation humanoid robot, the Figure 03, to the podcaster’s Nasvhille studio after it went viral for its appearance alongside First Lady Melania Trump at the White House. He said he believes humanoid robotics has finally crossed a major threshold and that Figure has effectively “pulled the future forward” by about a decade.
He described a future billions of agentic robots, perhaps trillions in digital form, handle both physical labor and computer-based tasks. This would massively increase productivity and would lead to an “age of abundance” where humans are freed from routine tasks and can focus on higher-level thinking, being creative, or just enjoying life.
Launched in 2022, San Jose-based Figure AI gained enormous momentum in early 2024 when OpenAI, alongside Microsoft, co-led its $700 million Series B funding round and took a board seat. At the time, OpenAI was focused mainly on large language models (LLMs) after dissolving its robotics program years earlier. The collaboration was intended to combine OpenAI’s expertise in frontier AI models with Figure’s rapidly evolving hardware platform.
Figure AI CEO on "Firing" OpenAI: "We just got like no value out of the whole relationship."
— Mike Kalil (@mikekalilmfg) March 30, 2026
Figure founder Brett Adcock brought a Figure 03 to Shawn Ryan's podcast, where he went into detail about the startup's early relationship with OpenAI that dissolved a year after it… pic.twitter.com/p2x2qAvNR7
A year later, Adcock announced that he decided to end the relationship. At the time, Adcock argued that LLMs are “the smallest piece of the puzzle” to achieving general autonomy in robotics. The dissolved relationship didn’t appear to affect fundraising, as Figure raised more than $1 billion last year for a staggering valuation of $39 billion.
Adcock, who previously launched Archer Aviation, said the arrangement was initially useful for fundraising but not much else. He said there was a lack of productive collaboration because OpenAI’s engineers couldn’t make it to Figure’s office enough for real-world testing.
“We just found that the team we had internally, we just kind of ran circles around them every day,” he said.
He said the breaking point came when he learned that OpenAI planned to resurrect its robotics program, which would make them competitors. He decided to stop sharing information with their team immediately as Figure’s engineers developed a vision-language-action (VLA) model called Helix.
“We’re like teaching you how to do robot learning,” he said. “You’re seeing our progress. There’s no way we’re going to teach you how to do this stuff anymore.”
Figure AI is racing to mass deploy its humanoids across sectors and eventually households. OpenAI had been tight-lipped about its robotics ambitions but it’s actively hiring for physical AI roles. When Sam Altman announced OpenAI was shutting down its Sora video generation app, he said its resources were being reallocated to the former nonprofit’s enterprise and robotics divisions.