The idea of a humanoid robot melting in a vat of liquid metal was mere science fiction when James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day hit theaters. Thirty-five years later, we can remove the fiction part.
California-based robotics company Figure AI saw to that after CEO Brett Adcock posted to X, asking the public for suggestions on the best “sendoff” for obsolete F.02 models taking up storage space at headquarters. One of the replies came from none other than the T-800 himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who wrote, “You should melt them.”
The Terminator star ended up appearing in a Figure-produced video (see below), which recreates the iconic ending of T2 by having a robot lower itself into molten metal on a chain before giving a thumbs-up as its last action. Standing nearby in a flame-resistant suit, Schwarzenegger echoed the gesture.
Other bots took spectacular dives into the magma-like bucket of melted steel scrap.
To get the bipedal robots to properly jump to their doom, Figure created an AI model based on the movements of stunt performers. They tested it out by having the machines jump off the second floor of a building and onto a large airbag below.
Arnold Schwarzenegger Recreates Terminator Moment With Robotics Company
Training robots to swan-dive into red-hot death was the easy part — getting access to a sizable smelting basin proved a little trickier than anticipated.
“None of the metal foundries we contacted in the U.S. and Mexico would let us jump a robot with lithium-ion batteries into their expensive equipment,” the company wrote in a press release. “We even reached out to former MythBusters to help with the search. In the end, the only place in the world we could find willing to take this on was a foundry in Imatra, Finland.”
They only had 24 hours and six melts to get the footage and even then, there was a scant 20-minute window before the Liquid metal hardened.
“Despite the extreme heat and electromagnetic fields,” continued the release, “the robots ran their AI policies seamlessly, even as camera equipment and other electronics failed in this environment…In an age of AI-generated footage, it’s worth being clear: we really trained robots to jump autonomously, shipped them to Finland, and had them leap into a vat of molten steel.”
The resultant metal bars were brought back to America and turned into limited edition keepsakes.
All we need now is for someone to crack the code on time travel and Cameron’s films can be reclassified as documentaries.
