Figure AI sued after safety chief warns of deadly robot risks
Figure AI faces a federal whistleblower lawsuit after its former safety chief says he was fired for warning that the company’s humanoid robots could cause fatal harm, reports a Qazinform News Agency correspondent.
The complaint, filed Friday in the Northern District of California, comes from Robert Gruendel, a principal robotic safety engineer who said he was terminated in September only days after submitting what he described as his most direct and fully documented safety warnings. According to the filing, he repeatedly alerted executives to hazardous behavior observed in laboratory tests and urged them to strengthen risk protocols.
The lawsuit follows Figure’s sharp rise in valuation to $39 billion during a funding round led by Parkway Venture Capital, a fifteenfold increase from early 2024. Investors in earlier rounds included Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Microsoft. Gruendel said he was asked to brief two potential investors on the company’s safety plan, and both later chose to invest. He claims he was stunned to find that the plan he presented had been significantly altered afterward, warning superiors that weakening it risked misleading investors.
In the filing, Gruendel said he informed CEO Brett Adcock and chief engineer Kyle Edelberg that the company’s machines were capable of deadly force. He cited an incident in which a malfunctioning robot sliced a quarter inch into a steel refrigerator door. His attorneys stated that his concerns were treated as obstacles rather than obligations, and that the company relied on what he called a vague change in business direction to justify his dismissal.
Gruendel seeks economic, compensatory, and punitive damages, along with a jury trial. A Figure spokesperson said by email that he was terminated for poor performance, calling his allegations falsehoods and pledging to contest them in court. His attorney, Robert Ottinger, told CNBC that state law protects employees who report unsafe practices, adding that the case may be one of the first whistleblower actions involving humanoid robot safety.
Earlier, Qazinform News Agency reported that Elon Musk shared an AI generated video of the Optimus humanoid robot on X, showing the machine performing construction tasks, training exercises, street patrols, and routine household activities.