Cases › physical harm › LR-2026-0317
Figure AI whistleblower lawsuit alleges humanoid robots could fracture skulls
Preliminary Why: 1 report: CNBC · subject to change · 1 independent report
Status: no action reported
No source states: loss or records, agent tool, could do, deployer, industry.
Severity minor: Test: minor (contained to one deployer or one evaluation, no third party touched). Fact: the only physical effect stated is a gash in a steel refrigerator door during one malfunction, and no third party is stated to be affected.
Figure AI, a developer of humanoid robots, was sued in a federal court in California by its former principal robotic safety engineer, Robert Gruendel. He alleges that he warned executives the robots were powerful enough to fracture a human skull, and cited a robot that carved a gash into a steel refrigerator door during a malfunction. He says he was fired in September, days after lodging safety complaints, and that he had warned against downgrading a safety roadmap shown to prospective investors. Figure says he was terminated for poor performance and that the allegations are falsehoods it will discredit in court. Gruendel seeks economic, compensatory and punitive damages. The sources report no injury to any person, and the claims remain unproven allegations.
What happened
What was done
No source states an action or fix.
Risks
Primary43 incidents
Sorted by rule from the case's fields; not yet read from the sources.
Controls
Not yet read for controls. Controls that mitigate the primary risk:
Harness ApplicationPhysical safety interlocks · Human approval for high-impact actions · Live behaviour monitoring · Adversarial testing before deployment
Evidence
No source states: what the AI was doing, what went wrong, how it was caught, when it happened, when it was found, how many records were exposed, the direct loss, a count of the other parties affected, any court case, the cause, what set it off, what was done.
Show the full account: 1 items from the primary sources
What happened, in order
- September Gruendel was fired, days after lodging his safety complaints.
Show every field, with its source and grade
The AI system
What happened
Impact
Context
Notes on gaps
No model, version, harness, tools, controls or remediation are stated, so those fields and the links list are empty. The sources do not say whether any safety plan was actually changed, only what the plaintiff alleges.
LR-2026-0317 · version 1 · published 2026-11-01 after automatic checks; not yet checked field by field by a person · JSON