OpenAI’s Rumored Phone Would Ditch Apps in Favor of AI Agents

OpenAI may be building a smartphone — and if the early reports are accurate, it won’t look much like the phone in your pocket.

Supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has a long track record of reporting on Apple hardware plans, says OpenAI is working on a phone in collaboration with chip makers MediaTek and Qualcomm, with Luxshare serving as a co-design and manufacturing partner. The project represents a notable reversal from previous reports that OpenAI had no plans to enter the phone market.

The core idea is a fundamental rethinking of what a smartphone does. Rather than launching individual apps, the device would rely on AI agents — software that completes tasks on your behalf. Think booking a restaurant, managing your calendar, or drafting an email, all handled by AI without you tapping through menus.

Today, Apple and Google control the app pipeline and the system access apps receive, restricting some of their functions. By building its own smartphone and hardware stack, OpenAI would be able to deploy AI capabilities without those restrictions.

Kuo argues that the smartphone is uniquely positioned for AI agent use because it is the only device that captures a user’s full real-time state — including location, activity, communication, and context — which he describes as the most important input for real-time AI inference.

On the hardware side, the processor would run small language models directly on the device for everyday tasks, then hand off heavier workloads to cloud-based AI — a split designed to keep things fast while preserving battery life.

Kuo projects 300 to 400 million annual shipments if the device succeeds, a figure that would exceed Apple’s iPhone volumes. Qualcomm’s shares surged as much as 13% in premarket trading following the report.

The timeline is still distant. Specifications and component suppliers are expected to be finalized by late 2026 or early Q1 2027, with mass production targeted for 2028.

It’s also worth noting the caveats. No company involved — OpenAI, Qualcomm, MediaTek, or any manufacturing partner — has confirmed the project. Luxshare denied any involvement as recently as January 2026, and a separate report from Trendforce indicated that OpenAI had already shifted a hardware order to Foxconn, with production planned in the US and Vietnam.

OpenAI is also pursuing a separate hardware strategy. The company’s collaboration with former Apple design chief Jony Ive, whose startup io Products was acquired by OpenAI for $6.5 billion, is focused on non-phone form factors — reportedly a smart speaker first, followed by glasses, a lamp, and earbuds.

OpenAI Chief Global Affairs Officer Chris Lehane has said the company is on track to announce its first hardware product in the second half of 2026. Whether that announcement is a phone, earbuds, or something else entirely remains to be seen.

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