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.