Melania Trump appears with humanoid robot at White House - The News International

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.

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. 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.