A fired safety engineer is suing his former employer, Figure AI, alleging he was retaliated against for warning that the company is rushing to produce AI-powered robots with “superhuman speed” and the ability to inflict “severe” injuries on humans.The former safety engineer, Robert Gruendel, filed a federal lawsuit in California, claiming that he was retaliated against for raising concerns that the company was “rush[ing] a potentially dangerous humanoid robot to market.”The complaint says that Mr. Gruendel was hired in 2024 to lead Figure AI’s product safety program. The company is developing “general-purpose humanoid robots for use in the home and workplace.”Figure AI says its robots are “human-shaped and AI-powered” and are designed to handle “household tasks the way you would.”However, Mr. Gruendel warns that they could cause their owners “permanent” and “severe” injury.Mr. Gruendel says he was tasked with developing a “home safety roadmap” to identify “relevant safety standards, critical legal risks, and regulatory requirements” before the robots go on the market.The engineer conducted a series of tests, including one in which Figure’s F.02 robot was programmed to “hit at its strongest capacity.”“During the impact test, F.02 moved at superhuman speed and the impact meter measured forces that were twenty times higher than the threshold of pain,” the lawsuit says. “Plaintiff estimated the force generated by F.02 to be approximately more than twice the force necessary to fracture an adult human skull.”However, Mr. Gruendel says that his messages expressing his concerns that the robots could inflict “severe permanent injury on humans” were ignored by the company’s chief executive officer, Brett Adcock. Mr. Gruendel also says he sent a message to the company’s chief engineer, Kyle Edelberg, warning that the company “needed to take immediate action to distance personnel from the robots.”“This conclusion was further evidenced by an instance where an employee was standing next to an F.02 and the F.02 malfunctioned and punched a refrigerator, narrowly missing the employee. The robot left a ¼-inch deep gash in the refrigerator’s stainless-steel door,” the lawsuit says. The lawsuit says that Mr. Gruendel’s safety concerns were treated as “obstacles, not obligations.”Mr. Gruendel’s complaint alleges that “just four days” after he warned of the “robots’ high risks to employees during a safety training meeting,” and weeks after he submitted written complaints about the robots, he was “summoned to a surprise meeting” and fired. The company said his termination was due to a “change in business direction.”However, the plaintiff’s attorneys allege the reasoning was pretextual, as executives had praised their client weeks before the meeting, and “no other senior leaders in comparable roles were terminated.”Figure AI said in a statement that Mr. Gruendel was “terminated for poor performance” and that his “allegations are falsehoods that Figure will thoroughly discredit in court.”
