Figure and OpenAI are breaking up.
A year after the two joined forces, Figure founder Brett Adcock just announced he decided to end the Silicon Valley robotics firm’s collaborative agreement with Sam Altman’s company. He says it’s because of a big breakthrough.
“Figure made a major breakthrough on fully end-to-end robot AI, built entirely in-house,” Adcock said on the X social media platform.
The move comes as Figure plans to aggressively scale production of its AI-powered humanoid robots while OpenAI ventures into hardware.
Sunnyvale-based Figure signed a collaborative agreement with OpenAI in February 2024 to develop next-generation AI models for humanoid robots. The startup, founded in 2022, planned to combine OpenAI’s research with Figure’s hardware to enable robots to process and reason from natural language.
The partnership came as Figure raised $675 million in Series B funding from investors including Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Intel, Amazon, and OpenAI. A few weeks later, Figure demonstrated its integration with ChatGPT with a video of its first-generation robot, the Figure 01, engaging in conversation.
Since then, Figure has introduced its second-generation humanoid, the Figure 02. A small fleet of Figure 02 robots started working full-time at the BMW factory in Spartanburg, SC in January 2025.
Figure is developing its next-generation robot, presumably called the Figure 03, that’s optimized for high-rate manufacturing. Adcock said Figure’s focus is on vertical growth with select key accounts rather than aggressive expansion.
In the split-up announcement, Adcock said the decision followed a major breakthrough on a fully end-to-end robot AI system built entirely in-house. He promised to demo the technology in the next 30 days.
Adcock told TechCrunch embodied AI in real-world scenarios cannot be achieved by outsourcing to OpenAI.
“We found that to solve embodied AI at scale in the real world, you have to vertically integrate robot AI,” he told TechCrunch. “We can’t outsource AI for the same reason we can’t outsource our hardware.”
Last week, Adcock announced that Figure had signed its second commercial customer. The founder didn’t name the customer, but said it’s one of the largest companies in the United States. Adcock said Figure is running an end-to-end neural network for the new client’s use case, which will be used for AI training.
With the new development, Adcock said he sees a path for shipping up to 100,000 humanoid robots over the next four years. To meet that goal, Figure would need to produce around a thousand units in 2025, which is possible as evidenced by Agibot, a younger Chinese startup that says it manufactured a thousand robots in 2024.
Figure is seen as perhaps the most formidable competitor for Tesla, which plans to produce up to 10,000 Optimus humanoid robots this year. While Tesla’s production target is much larger than Figure’s, Elon Musk has admitted it’s highly aspirational.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has shown a renewed interest in robotics. The startup recently relaunched its robotics team after disbanding it in 2020. This includes hiring for roles that will train multi-modal robotics models, explore new model architectures, collect robotics data, and conduct evaluations.
OpenAI’s first foray into robotics was in 2017 with the introduction of Dactyl, an AI system for training a robotic hand through simulation using reinforcement learning. Research continued throughout the late 2010s, with initiatives focused on teaching robots new tasks with AI and experiments with VR headsets for demonstration learning.
OpenAI resurrected its robotics team in May 2024 with a focus on training AI models for embodied intelligence. In November 2024, Caitlin Kalinowski, the former head of Meta’s AR glasses initiative, joined OpenAI to lead its robotics and consumer hardware efforts.
Reports indicate that OpenAI is considering developing its own humanoid robot. There are hints in job listings that OpenAI is creating its own robotics hardware including custom sensors and electronics.
According to reports, OpenAI also just filed a trademark application in the US that included references to user-programmable humanoid robots. They’re described as humanoids with communication and learning functions for assisting and entertaining people.
OpenAI also backs Norway-based 1X Technologies, which is readying its next generation AI robot, NEO, for home use.