First lady Melania Trump walked side by side with a sleek, black-and-white faceless figure Wednesday during an education summit she hosted at the White House. Despite its appearance, it wasn’t an otherworldly creature. It was a humanoid AI robot, known as Figure 03.
In videos from the summit, the robot can be seen mechanically strolling next to the first lady, even welcoming all in the room in several different languages and waving its hand.
“Figure 03, thank you for joining me,” the first lady said. “It’s fair to state you are my first American-made humanoid guest in the White House.”
Videos of the first lady walking beside the robot quickly went viral online and accumulated hundreds of thousands of views and comments, but little was said about who made the robot and what it’s used for.
The robot was created by the AI robotics company Figure, one of the top companies in the burgeoning AI sub-industry racing to create lifelike robots. Six months ago, the company posted on LinkedIn that it had surpassed $1 billion in funding, which included investments from Nvidia and LG Technology Ventures. CEO and founder Brett Adcock celebrated in a Wednesday X post that the robot made “history as the first humanoid robot in the White House.”
The 5’8,” roughly 135-pound robot is touted by the company as an autonomous tool for delegating household tasks. It’s covered in mesh fabric and includes cameras in the hands and tactile sensors to help operators see its targets. In promotional videos, it can be seen loading a dishwasher, doing laundry, picking up toys and folding clothes.
At the summit, focused on AI and education, the first lady spoke to 45 female world leaders about the potential benefits of the technology in the lives of young people, including through AI humanoid educators.
“Very soon, artificial intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humanoids that deliver utility,” Melania Trump said. “Imagine a humanoid educator named ‘Plato.’ Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous — literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics and history — humanity’s entire corpus of information is available in the comfort of your home.”
The Figure 03 robot, which is not currently marketed for educational purposes or available for direct-to-consumer purchase, works through a vision-language-action (VLA) model. VLA models process real-time data through visual-perception sensors, such as cameras, and then use AI reasoning to solve, predict and complete tasks. Figure 03 uses the company’s own VLA AI model, called Helix. The model allows the robot to also respond to verbal commands.
Figure AI does not appear to have any active contracts with the federal government. Neither the White House nor Figure immediately responded to a request for comment.
But humanoid AI robots have reportedly caught the attention of the Trump administration, which has explored the use of similar robots as potential aides for the U.S. military.
This doesn’t appear to be the focus of Figure 03. Previous robots built by Figure, such as the Figure 02, are focused more on manual labor tasks. Adcock has previously said that the company hopes that the robots can act as a way to address labor shortages in the U.S.
“Today, manual labor compensation is the primary driver of goods and services prices,” Adcock wrote on the company’s website, “as these robots ‘join the workforce,’ everywhere from factories to farmland, the cost of labor will decrease until it becomes equivalent to the price of renting a robot, facilitating a long-term, holistic reduction in costs. Over time, humans could leave the loop altogether as robots become capable of building other robots — driving prices down even more.”
