NextFin News - The high-profile alliance between Figure AI and OpenAI has dissolved into a direct rivalry, as Figure CEO Brett Adcock revealed that the partnership provided "very little" value beyond brand recognition. Speaking on "The Shawn Ryan Show" on Tuesday, Adcock detailed a breakdown in collaboration that culminated in OpenAI’s decision to pursue humanoid robotics internally, a move that effectively ended their formal cooperation less than a year after it began.
The friction between the two Silicon Valley entities highlights a growing divide in the race for embodied artificial intelligence. While OpenAI co-led Figure’s $675 million Series B round in early 2024, Adcock noted that the technical synergy never materialized. He described a fundamental disconnect in work culture and technical requirements, claiming he struggled to get OpenAI’s team into the office to run physical demos. According to Adcock, the specialized techniques required for robotics—where neural networks must interact with the physical world—differed significantly from the chatbot-centric expertise of the OpenAI staff.
Adcock’s critique extends to the strategic risks of the partnership. He alleged that OpenAI leaders, including CEO Sam Altman, visited Figure’s facilities and were impressed by the startup’s proprietary neural networks, only for OpenAI to later announce its own internal humanoid ambitions. This shift transformed a collaborative effort into a competitive one, leading Adcock to terminate the agreement to prevent further information sharing that he believed would disadvantage Figure in the long term.
The fallout has already seen a rebuttal from within OpenAI. Tao Xu, a long-time member of OpenAI’s technical staff, dismissed Adcock’s characterization of the partnership as "not true" in a social media post. This public disagreement underscores the tension as OpenAI aggressively scales its own hardware capabilities. Reports from January 2026 indicate that OpenAI has established a dedicated robotics lab in San Francisco, employing approximately 100 data collectors to train robotic arms for household tasks, signaling a definitive return to the hardware sector it had abandoned in 2020.
For Figure, the split was also a matter of talent acquisition. Adcock explained that the partnership created a "hiring challenge," as prospective engineers often mistakenly assumed OpenAI was responsible for the intelligence while Figure merely built the "metal." By bringing all AI development in-house, Figure aims to clarify its identity as a full-stack robotics company. The startup continues to leverage a team featuring veterans from Google DeepMind and Tesla, focusing on its "Figure 02" model which recently began testing in BMW’s manufacturing facilities.
The competition is intensifying as other players consolidate their positions. OpenAI maintains a stake in the Norwegian-American robotics firm 1X, while Tesla continues to iterate on its Optimus platform. Adcock’s decision to sever ties suggests a belief that the "brain" of a robot cannot be decoupled from its body, a stance that challenges the prevailing model of AI companies providing generalized software to hardware partners. Whether a specialized startup can outpace a diversified giant like OpenAI in the physical world remains the central question for the robotics industry in 2026.
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