(OpenAI)

AIs Wide Shut

OpenAI says its AI device will be “multimodal” but doesn’t give many more details

Here’s what we know about the Jony Ive and OpenAI device so far.

11/6/25 8:34AM

In an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar was most clear about what she couldn’t say about the company’s forthcoming AI device. She wouldn’t say how the device, which former Apple design lead Jony Ive is helping to develop, would look, how she uses it, or whether or not it would require a phone.

What she did say was that it would be “multimodal.”

“In a multimodal world for AI, what is beautiful about these models is they are as good through text as they are through being able to talk, language, to be able to listen, auditorily, to be able to visually see,” Friar said.

We might be reading too deep, but to us that suggests the device will have a keyboard, speakers, and a screen... much like a phone!

Cellphones, she said, have accustomed us to looking down at our screens and “talking with our thumbs.”

“I’m looking forward to being able to bring something into the world that I think starts to shift that,” Friar said. She added that she believes “it will open the door to technology that is being shut to many, many people,” and cited a visually impaired parent as an example of someone who might have trouble using a smartphone.

To review what’s been reported about the personal assistant AI device so far:

It will be “palm-sized” or “roughly the size of a smartphone.”
The device will be “always on” so, unlike Amazon’s Alexa, it won’t need a wake word.
It’s meant to be a “companion” for everyday life.
Users will communicate with the device “through a camera, microphone and speaker.”
It will be “fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, [and] able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
Developers are conceiving of it as a third device people will need, in addition to an iPhone and a MacBook Pro, but one that isn’t a phone or glasses.
It’s meant to wean users off screens.
It could include headphones or cameras.
OpenAI plans to ship 100 million of these devices “faster than any company has ever shipped 100 million of something new before.”
The release date is expected to be by late 2026.
It’s not going to kill the iPhone... yet. “In the same way that the smartphone didn’t make the laptop go away, I don’t think our first thing is going to make the smartphone go away,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Bloomberg. “It is a totally new kind of thing.”

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While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5