After a splashy Super Bowl ad teasing its partnership with Jony Ive, OpenAI is now rumored to be building a ChatGPT-powered smartphone with major chipmakers, aiming for a 2028 launch. The concept centers on AI agents that handle tasks across apps in the background, promising a more seamless experience than today’s AI features on Samsung, Pixel or iPhone devices.
For the past year, Sam Altman has been inching OpenAI out of the browser and into your pocket, your desk, and eventually your entire life. The big swing came when OpenAI dropped a casual $6.5 billion to absorb Jony Ive’s hardware startup, io, to take on the likes of Apple.
And yes, they made a whole spectacle out of it. Not a product demo or a prototype in sight, they dropped a Super Bowl commercial about the two tech giants working together. Ever since, there has been a lot of chatter about what the two could be making. One time it was a ChatGPT-infused speaker with a built-in camera. Another time it was a smart lamp. Earbuds have also been a contender.
Now, the latest exhibit to hit the rumour mill is an AI Agentic smartphone. According to industry analyst and longtime reporter on Apple’s hardware updates, Ming-Chi Kuo, OpenAI is working with MediaTek, Qualcomm, and Luxshare to come up with a ChatGPT-powered phone, expected to go into mass production in 2028.
Right now, your phone is basically a grid of apps competing for your attention. You open Uber, Maps, WhatsApp, whatever you need, and then tap on till your task is done (or forget what you unlocked your phone for). An AI-based smartphone replaces these apps with one (or more) AI agents, so instead of you navigating apps, you tell an AI what you want: book me a cab, send that file, plan my evening, and so on and so forth. The AI agent does the task in the background and gives you the results directly.
Wait, isn’t that what Google’s Gemini and Apple’s Siri already do? And you’ll be right to think of it like this, because the AI agent phone is just an upgrade of this feature. As it is, every phone maker has been integrating AI into it’s phones for some time now. Take Samsung, for example. The Galaxy S26 phones feature automated app actions, allowing you to hail an Uber with just a voice command. Google’s Pixel 10 has Magic Cue, an AI powered function that anticipates what you’re going to do next on your phone.
If anything, Apple and Google have rather strict privacy controls on what apps can do and how deeply they can integrate into the system (FYI, an AI agent is only as good as the amount of info it has on you). OpenAI building its own AI-only hardware stack means it can remove those limits and let its AI run wild across everything.