Rumor has it OpenAI is building an agentic AI smartphone

OpenAI apparently doesn’t just run the most talked about AI chatbot on the planet. The company now wants to be in your pocket too.

Prominent Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo released results this weekend revealing that OpenAI is developing a smartphone built around AI agents rather than traditional apps. According to Kuo, the device is built in partnership with MediaTek and Qualcomm on the processor side, with Luxshare being the exclusive manufacturing partner.

Mass production is not expected until 2028, with specifications and suppliers likely set by late 2026 or early 2027.

The main pitch, according to Kuo, is a fundamental overhaul of how our phones work.

Instead of juggling a stack of apps, users would simply tell their phone what they want to do, and the AI ​​agent would accomplish that task. OpenAI is reportedly building an agentic AI operating system based on this principle.

Kuo notes that OpenAI has several advantages in this space, including an established consumer brand, years of accumulated user data, and pioneering AI models. The phone would combine on-device AI for continuous context awareness with cloud-based AI handling heavier computational tasks.

This is a separate endeavor from OpenAI’s previously announced hardware ambitions. The company worked alongside former Apple design chief Jony Ive on a small, screen-free AI companion device.

As Mashable reported last October, this project faced significant development hurdles, including software architecture challenges, infrastructure hurdles, and the thorny question of how to create an “always-on” AI personality that seems useful rather than scary.

A source close to the project told the Financial Times that OpenAI was already running out of steam keeping ChatGPT running, which would cost between $3 billion and $4 billion a year. A release initially planned for 2026 could be postponed to 2027.

The real question is whether OpenAI can actually meet its hardware ambitions. Several “revolutionary” AI devices have already gone to the technological graveyard. The Rabbit R1 promised similar things. The same was true for Humane Pin, which was discontinued less than a year after its launch. OpenAI is betting that it is not like the others.

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Disclosure: Ziff Davis, the parent company of Mashable, filed a lawsuit in April 2025 against OpenAI, alleging that it had violated Ziff Davis’ copyrights in the training and operation of its AI systems.