Here is a lesson in Silicon Valley etiquette: if your partner starts copying your homework, the partnership is over.

Figure AI CEO Brett Adcock went on The Shawn Ryan Show this week and torched the bridge between his humanoid robotics company and OpenAI with a level of candor you rarely see from founders who took money from Sam Altman. The partnership, which began when OpenAI co-led Figure's Series B in 2024, lasted less than a year. Adcock's verdict: it delivered "very little" beyond the OpenAI logo on press releases.

The arrangement was supposed to produce "next-generation AI models" for Figure's robots. Instead, Adcock says his own team of Google DeepMind alumni did the real work while OpenAI's people were hard to get "in the office." In robotics, you cannot iterate on neural networks from a Slack channel. You need to run the robot, watch it fail, adjust, and repeat. OpenAI's team, world-class at building chatbots, apparently struggled with the physical reality of making machines move.

Then came the call that ended everything. OpenAI told Adcock it planned to pursue humanoid robotics internally. "I was just like, this is over," Adcock said. He worried about "information passing back" that would help a future competitor.

OpenAI has since built a robotics lab with roughly 100 data collectors teaching a robotic arm household tasks and has backed Norwegian-American robot maker 1X. OpenAI staffer Tao Xu reposted the interview clip on X and called Adcock's account "not true," but offered no specifics.

The Real Cost of the OpenAI Brand

Adcock revealed an unexpected side effect of the partnership: it made hiring harder. Candidates assumed OpenAI handled the AI and Figure handled the hardware. Explaining that Figure had its own model development team became a recurring headache during recruitment.

"There was some good brand association there, but beyond that, there was not much," Adcock said.

This matters because OpenAI is now openly entering the humanoid robotics race. Figure, Boston Dynamics, Unitree, Tesla, and a dozen Chinese startups are already in the arena. Adding the company with the biggest AI brand, deepest pockets, and a fresh $122 billion fundraise changes the calculus for everyone.

Adcock is not running from the fight. "We are going to be competitors," he said. Given that Figure's robots were impressive enough to get invited to the White House last week, he might have earned the right to say it. But competing against OpenAI's checkbook is a different sport than competing against OpenAI's robotics team. And right now, Altman has both.

First reported by Business Insider.