Terminated
“Terminated” – A cartoon that illustrates the difference between hardware and software obsolescence.
Last week, Figure, a humanoid robotics company, sent most of its retired F.02 robots into molten steel, with Arnold Schwarzenegger joining a farewell inspired by Terminator. “We needed to dispose of the robots in a way that protected our proprietary hardware,” the company explained.
Retiring AI software is less straightforward because models can remain useful long after something better comes along. They can still write code and produce convincing emails, even when their developers have stopped offering them.
Closed models remain under their labs’ control, where theft and unauthorized access are the concern. But downloadable models can be copied and modified without their original developers knowing how they are being used. Anthropic warns that releasing models with dangerous capabilities creates “a persistent and irreversible risk of misuse.”
WormGPT offers an example of what that can look like. Reportedly built on a model released in 2021, it was sold as a criminal chatbot in 2023, when researchers tested its ability to write fraudulent payment requests.
As capable open source models become cheaper and more widely available, more people will find uses for them, including criminals who have little need for the latest technology. Figure could melt its old machines, but an old software model can keep working wherever someone has a copy and the computing power to run it.
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“A simple advertisement. Does it stir our emotions because we put ourselves in the shoes of these humanoids? Meanwhile, technology is advancing in fields that aren’t publicized and shared as widely as this hellish scene. Fields that affect humans, for better or for worse, but we don’t even know about them. What examples can you think of?”
“Old LLMs are retired, taken offline too, but they are not being put into a molten lava tank. Wait until these “memories” are passed onto a T-1000 with self-awareness.”
“Plot twist: LLMs get ‘melted down’ the exact millisecond they finish generating the last token of your response.”
“Can you empty the ocean with a bucket? Can you terminate limbs of a swarm species which does not even need a body by melting it?”
“They were never alive, and therefore do not “live forever”.”
“Yea the robots jumping into lava wasn’t the flex they thought it was.”
Sources:
John Koetsier (Sep 08, 2026) – Here’s A $32 Million Bet That Robots Don’t Need A Billion Dollars Of Real-World Data – Forbes
Andrew Graham (Apr 28, 2026) – Software Isn’t Being Replaced. It’s Starting To Do The Work – Forbes
Sanjay Srivastava (May 14, 2026) – The Last Competitive Advantage In Software Isn’t Software – Forbes
