Brett Adcock says he terminated Figure's AI collaboration agreement with OpenAI
Brett Adcock · The $10 Trillion Bet on Humanoid Robots | Figure Founder Brett Adcock · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · Apr 30, 2026 · at 17:38
Brett Adcock, founder and CEO of Figure, describes ending Figure's joint model development agreement with OpenAI.
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“And so I fired him.”
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More from Brett Adcock
Adcock claims Figure's internal AI team was running circles around OpenAI
“It got to a point where we were just like, our team internally that was designing these models were running circles around OpenAI. We were just way better at this. And we were better about testing on the robots, training the models, like all, all of it.”
Adcock: Trying to code humanoid robot behaviors is a complete dead end
“You basically can code your way out of this, and I think that's a full dead end, or you can run an AI-first strategy in the market, and that's what we do here at Figure.”
Adcock: Figure demonstration robots run purely autonomously with onboard Helix AI
“This is not tele-operated.
For sure not tele-operated.
No secret room.
these robots are running purely autonomously from an onboard AI policy called Helix running onboard the robot in the torso.”
Adcock: Figure plans to lease home humanoids for $400-$600 monthly
“The in-home, like, we have, we're not selling right now to the home. We want to sell here like, in the near term, and we want to sell the robot, like, for, like, hundreds of dollars a month, and as, like, somewhere like a car lease maybe, like, four or five, 6…”
Adcock: Figure is probably a few years ahead of all global competitors
“We think we're probably at this point a few years ahead of every big, everybody globally doing this.”
Boston Dynamics' Atlas was an unsafe, uncommercial research project, says Adcock
“And I think for humanoids, like, you know, the best we had four years ago was like a, you know, Boston Dynamics had a hydraulic humanoid called Atlas. It like dripped oils everywhere. It lasted like 20 minutes. It was like very big, very unsafe. You could neve…”