Tech
Figure robot sorting packages GIF
(Figure)

Figure’s robots just sorted packages for 200 hours straight

What started as a 10-hour human-versus-robot challenge turned into a continuous marathon shift spanning nine days of continuous work.

Recently we’ve seen a lot of marathon-running, kickboxing, and moonwalking robots show off some impressive feats. But if bipedal humanoid robots are really going to be the multitrillion-dollar industry that Elon Musk predicts, they’re going to need to do some economically valuable work.

Early this morning, Figure, a robotics company based in San Jose, California, completed that kind of robotic flex: its Figure 03 robots worked a demonstration package-sorting line for 200 hours straight. In a post on X, Figure founder and CEO Brett Adcock said that what started as a planned eight-hour challenge turned into a marathon sorting shift spanning nine days.

The livestreamed video showed a count of 249,560 packages sorted over 200 hours — that’s eight days and eight hours — the equivalent of 25 human eight-hour shifts. All with no bathroom or meal breaks.

The challenge started as a “Man vs. Machine head-to-head” challenge to see who could sort more packages over 10 hours: the Figure 03 robot or Aime, the human intern.

Adcock noted, “We’re following California labor laws, so the human gets both meal breaks and paid rest breaks during the shift.”

The task was to sort small packages — find the barcode and place it face-down on the conveyor belt. After 10 hours, the intern won, sorting 12,924 packages to the robot’s 12,735.

Adcock added his prediction to the post:

“This is the last time a human will ever win.”

To be fair, this wasn’t one robot standing in place the entire time. A series of robots working in concert and communicating together took turns swapping out when the working robot’s battery was low (which Adcock said was about every three to four hours). Then the active robot would step back and walk away to recharge, and the next robot would step in and pick up where the first robot left off.

Adcock said in a post that the task was completed autonomously by the team of robots, with “no humans in the loop.”

The company said it has finalized the design of the next iteration of the robot, Figure 04.

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Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

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