OpenAI Building Screenless Smart Speaker With Ex-Apple Engineers
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- OpenAI is building its first hardware product: a screenless, mobile smart speaker that syncs with ChatGPT and is pitched internally as a "humanlike AI companion that lives in the home," per Bloomberg.
- The device is described as having a "personality," proactively learning about its owner over time, accessing their digital life including emails, and featuring "mechanical elements that can move on their own."
- Former Apple engineers who helped create the iPhone and Mac contributed to the device's development, according to Bloomberg.
- Apple sued OpenAI last week alleging trade secret theft, calling the claims "the tip of the iceberg"; OpenAI sources told Bloomberg their product "veers significantly from anything Apple has on the market today" and is "unlikely that it violates trade secrets."
- Hark, founded by Brett Adcock, raised an oversubscribed $700 million Series A at a $6 billion valuation in May to build proprietary AI models paired with custom hardware.
- The device is still under development and OpenAI has not announced a release timeline, though the company has long hinted at ambitions to launch its own hardware, including rumored phone plans.
Why it matters: OpenAI is entering consumer hardware while simultaneously defending itself in an Apple trade-secret lawsuit — a direct collision that could shape whether the company ships this product at all. With $700M already flowing into rival AI-hardware labs like Hark, the category is attracting serious capital before any device hits shelves, raising the competitive stakes for OpenAI's debut.
