23rd May 2025

Written by Andy Moseby.

OpenAI has just done something profoundly un-OpenAI: it’s bought a hardware company. The announcement that it has acquired io – the secretive design venture set up by Jony Ive and backed by SoftBank – reads like a love letter to possibility more than a straight M&A move.  But behind the gloss and lofty promises, what has OpenAI actually bought?

The answer isn’t a product – at least not yet. Io hasn’t released anything tangible, but it has assembled something arguably more valuable: a dream team. With around 55 designers, engineers, and product thinkers (many ex-Apple) and with Ive’s design studio LoveFrom still in the creative driving seat, OpenAI has bought vision, talent and a powerful design aesthetic. This is not a startup with a prototype and a pitch deck. It’s a studio of high-calibre minds, building the next generation of devices in stealth.

Why now? OpenAI has never really played in the consumer space. Its partnerships with Microsoft have been largely platform-oriented, embedding GPTs into Azure, Teams and Copilot. But over the past year, something’s shifted: an investment in humanoid robotics firm 1X, funding AI chipmaker Rain AI and ramping up hiring for product and hardware roles. Then the coup of poaching Caitlin “CK” Kalinowski, Meta’s former head of AR hardware, including its augmented reality glasses project. And now this. There’s a narrative forming and it’s more than speculative.

Here’s the likely reasoning behind the deal: OpenAI no longer wants to live in someone else’s device. Right now, it’s piggybacking on iPhones, Android, and laptops. That makes it vulnerable: to App Store politics, to privacy debates, to latency issues. If you’re building artificial general intelligence to match or surpass a human’s capabilities (and telling the world you are) you don’t want your revolutionary breakthrough delivered through Siri. You want your own interface. Your own device. Your own rules. Your own price point.

The deal, rumoured to be all-equity and valuing io at $6.4 billion, is as much a bet on design as it is on distribution. Ive’s legacy at Apple – think bubble-shaped iMac, iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch, AirPods – is in making devices that feel inevitable. That legacy, paired with Kalinowski’s spatial computing expertise, points to a future where OpenAI isn’t just the brain, it’s the body as well. Not just software you interact with on a screen, but hardware that’s ambient, wearable – maybe even invisible.

So what could an OpenAI device look like?  Not another smartphone, that’s for sure. It might be a subtle, always-on assistant that replaces your phone’s functions without replicating its form. Voice-first, screen-light and privacy-forward. Think less “supercomputer in your pocket” more “AI concierge in your ear”; less HAL 9000 more JARVIS. Something that feels like a natural extension of you, not another brick in your pocket. And with Ive and Kalinowski in the driving seat, you can bet it will look and feel beautiful.

For the AI sector, this is a flare in the sky. Most major AI labs are still racing to out-model each other, but OpenAI is pivoting into product.

The message is clear: owning the user experience is now as important as owning the model. This move will put pressure on rivals like Anthropic, Mistral and Google DeepMind to think beyond cloud APIs and labs. Hardware is suddenly back in fashion but this time, it’s AI-native.

More broadly, it’s a signal that AI is about to break out of the browser tab and enter the physical world. The next wave of consumer interaction with AI won’t happen on chat.openai.com; it’ll happen through something you wear, touch, or speak to. If OpenAI gets it right, it may finally do what Silicon Valley has promised for decades (and what Arthur C Clarke originally prophesised): make computing feel less like technology and more like magic.

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