OpenAI's first device is a movable, screenless companion speaker

Mark Gurman's latest Bloomberg report puts a shape on the object OpenAI and Jony Ive have been quietly building. According to Gurman, the first device will be a movable, screenless speaker with an integrated camera, built as what he calls an AI companion. OpenAI is reportedly still targeting a 2026 unveiling and a 2027 release, at a price between $200 and $300, with Foxconn set to manufacture in Vietnam or the United States.

The pitch is that the device learns who is using it and what is around them, and does so without a display. Gurman describes an internal OpenAI presentation in which the speaker observes users and suggests actions to help them meet their goals, for example nudging an earlier bedtime ahead of a morning meeting. MacRumors' write-up of the earlier Gurman reporting added that the camera would support Face ID-style recognition and let users trigger purchases straight from the speaker.

This is the piece of the OpenAI stack that has been most speculated about since the company acquired Ive's hardware firm io in May 2025, and it is landing into a much more hostile environment than it started in. Apple sued OpenAI last week for trade-secret theft, accusing the AI startup and its hardware chief of a coordinated campaign to pull information about unreleased products out of former Apple employees and prospective hires. A person familiar with the plans told Gurman the announce-this-year, ship-in-2027 timeline still holds, though it could shift as OpenAI reviews Apple's claims, and Bloomberg Intelligence sees targeted preliminary relief as the more likely outcome of Apple's expected injunction motion.

The honest caveat is that this is single-source reporting citing people familiar with the plans, and no product has been shown. Take the specifics as reported, not settled: form factor, price band and launch date have all shifted before in this project's short public life, and the Apple case is a genuine wildcard on top of that. What the reporting does not give you is how OpenAI plans to answer the obvious privacy question of an always-listening, camera-equipped home device, or what silicon and what on-device model actually run it.

If the thing ships anywhere near the described spec, the interesting fight is not really OpenAI versus Apple in court; it is a camera-equipped, always-on ChatGPT endpoint being dropped into a room already occupied by Amazon's Echo and Google's Nest, at a price point where a curious household will actually try it.