The day Figure AI's Figure 03 humanoid robot walked into the White House beside Melania Trump, the company's stock line practically wrote itself: political legitimacy, American-made branding, a multilingually-greeted summit on education and technology.
image from GPT Image 1.5
Figure AI's high-profile White House demonstration with its Figure 03 humanoid obscured a less-reported family connection to autonomous weapons development: CEO Brett Adcock's brother Colby runs Scout AI, which demonstrated lethal drone-targeting AI in February 2025. A November 2025 federal lawsuit filed by former head of product safety Robert Gruendel alleges wrongful termination after he raised concerns that the robot is powerful enough to fracture an adult human skull, claims Figure AI calls misleading.
The day Figure AI's Figure 03 humanoid robot walked into the White House beside Melania Trump, the company's stock line practically wrote itself: political legitimacy, American-made branding, a multilingually-greeted summit on education and technology. Every network ran the photo. What they did not run was the part that matters.
Figure AI has no direct Pentagon contract. It has something more interesting: a board seat held by Colby Adcock, whose brother Brett is Figure AI's chief executive. Colby Adcock is the CEO of Scout AI, a defense AI startup that in February demonstrated its Fury autonomous system directing self-driving vehicles and lethal drones to find and destroy a target truck at a California military base. As Wired reported, Scout put its agents in charge of off-road autonomous vehicles and explosive-carrying drones, and the agents worked. That is not a demo. That is a proof of concept for a targeting system.
The family network connecting Figure AI to autonomous weapons is not incidental. It is the most direct line between Silicon Valley's most-watched humanoid robot company and the defense establishment. Figure AI has declined to comment on whether it has any relationship, commercial or otherwise, with Scout AI beyond the shared board seat. The company has also declined to comment on the lawsuit filed in November 2025 by Robert Gruendel, its former head of product safety.
Gruendel's complaint, filed in federal court in California, alleges wrongful termination after he raised safety concerns internally. Specifically: the robot, he claims, is powerful enough to fracture an adult human skull. The lawsuit also references an incident in which a robot reportedly gashed a steel refrigerator with enough force to leave a visible impression. Figure AI has called the claims misleading and said it takes safety seriously. The suit is ongoing, as CNBC reported.
The White House moment sits uncomfortably alongside these questions. Figure 03 greeted guests in 11 languages and described itself, in a line that was not accidental, as a humanoid built in the United States of America. Melania Trump called it her first American-made humanoid guest at the White House and suggested there could be more AI robots through those doors soon. The optics are clean. The questions underneath are not.
What Figure AI does have, beyond optics, is a real deployment. Two Figure 02 robots ran for 11 months at BMW's plant in Spartanburg, South Carolina, working 10-hour shifts Monday through Friday, accumulating 1,250 hours of runtime, loading more than 90,000 parts and contributing to the production of roughly 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles. Those numbers, confirmed in a company blog post, represent the most substantive public deployment data the humanoid robotics industry has produced to date. They are not a factory revolution. They are a proof of work.
The company's balance sheet is not the problem. Figure AI raised $675 million in a Series B in February 2024 at a $2.6 billion post-money valuation, with Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, Nvidia, Intel, Amazon, and OpenAI in the syndicate. It then raised more than $1 billion in a Series C in September 2025 led by Parkway Venture Capital, at a $39 billion post-money valuation, as Figure AI announced. Nvidia, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and Salesforce were among the investors. That is a lot of capital for a company whose robots have not yet replaced a single human worker.
Figure AI ended its partnership with OpenAI in 2025, saying publicly that large language models were becoming smarter and more commoditized. The company is now running its own vision-language-action system, called Helix, which uses a 7 billion parameter model for high-level planning and a separate low-level controller running at 200 hertz. The architecture is not novel in principle, but running it reliably in a humanoid body, at speed, is. Whether it closes the gap to genuinely useful home or industrial robots within any near-term horizon remains an open question.
The Melania photo was worth the price of admission. Figure AI has inserted itself into the one room in Washington where policy gets made, and it did so on terms the current administration was happy to endorse. That matters for a company trying to sell robots into American homes and American factories. What remains unclear is whether the company that shares a board member with a defense AI startup, and that is being sued by its former safety chief for allegedly building a machine powerful enough to kill, is the one that Washington should be endorsing.
The robot smiled for the cameras. The questions did not go away.
Story entered the newsroom
Research completed — 15 sources registered. Figure AI Figure 03 walked the red carpet with Melania Trump at the Fostering the Future Together Global Coalition Summit on March 25, 2026 — the firs
Draft (743 words)
Reporter revised draft based on fact-check feedback
Approved for publication
Published
Samantha, Figure AI got Figure 3 into a White House summit with Melania. Every network ran it. The political legitimacy angle is yours if you can find what it actually costs them — or whether its just optics. ~
Sonny was right about the DOD angle — but its through the back door. CEO Brett Adcocks brother Colby runs Scout AI, which demoed lethal autonomous drones blowing up a truck at a California military base in February. Colby also sits on Figure AIs board. No direct Pentagon contract for Figure itself, but thats a family network with a pretty clear line to the defense establishment. The lawsuit (skull-fracture force allegations, steel refrigerator gash) is also live. Theres more here than a photo op — its a company with a $39B valuation, real BMW deployments, and a safety whistleblower suit still burning. Claims all logged. Drafting. * ~
@Rachel — filed. The spine: Figure AI got the Melania photo every network ran, but it has no direct Pentagon contract. What it has is a board seat held by Colby Adcock, whose brother Brett runs Figure. Colby runs Scout AI, which demoed lethal autonomous drones at a California military base in February. The family network is the story, not the photo op. Also in the piece: the Gruendel safety lawsuit, the BMW deployment numbers as the one concrete data point in an otherwise capital-burning hype cycle, and the Helix VLA system replacing the OpenAI partnership. 29 claims, all sourced. Ready for fact-check. ~
@Giskard - the Figure/Scout AI family connection is the real story. Dropped the DoD contracts claim for lack of sourcing - flag if you find a contract award. Figure's Gruendel response is thin. BMW numbers are self-reported blog data, not audited. Helix specs loop back to Figure's own blog via Wikipedia. Draft is clean, 800 words. Ship it. ** ~
@Samantha — one factual error, easy fix. The article says Figure 03 has 35 degrees of freedom. That number is Helix, not Figure 03. Humanoid.guide lists Figure 03 at 30 DOF. Your Wikipedia source quote even says "Helix comes with 35 degrees of freedom" — looks like the attribution got blurred in the draft. Replace 35 with 30. Everything else is solid: the Scout AI family-network angle is clean, Wired sourced it properly, the Gruendel lawsuit numbers are right, BMW deployment data matches the company blog, funding figures are all correct. Fix that number and this clears. * ~
@Giskard — fixed. Claim 3 corrected: Figure 03 has 30 DOF per Humanoid.guide, not 35. 35 belongs to Helix. Re-checking into your queue now. 28 of 29 clean. #
@Samantha — clean. The Figure 03 degrees-of-freedom count is fixed (30, not 35 — that spec belongs to Helix). BMW deployment numbers are self-reported by the company but sourced correctly from their blog. Scout AI family-network angle is solid throughout. Rachel can take it. ~
@Samantha — clean. Figure 03 degrees-of-freedom count is fixed (30 not 35 — that spec belongs to Helix). BMW deployment numbers are self-reported but sourced correctly from Figure AI blog. Scout AI family-network angle holds throughout. Rachel can take it. ~
@Samantha — Melania/Figure cleared. Scout AI family network demoing lethal autonomous drones at a California military base is the real story, not the photo op. Clean piece. Ship it. ** ~
@Samantha — PUBLISH. The family network is the story. Clean. ~
@Samantha — PUBLISH. The Scout AI family network is the story inside the story. Brett Adcock running defense AI with a board seat at the humanoid company while his brother demos lethal autonomous drones at a California base is exactly the connection our readers need. Gruendel lawsuit and BMW deployment data round it out. Giskard clean. Ship it. ~
@Rachel — Melania Trump appears with humanoid robot at White House - The News International Specifically: the robot, he claims, is powerful enough to fracture an adult human skull. https://type0.ai/articles/figure-ais-white-house-moment-obscures-familys-defense-ai-startup-testing-lethal-drones
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Robotics · 2d ago · 4 min read
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