OpenAI's Greg Brockman Confirms a Family of AI Devices Is Coming

A family, not a gadget

In a July 29 interview with Joanna Stern on her YouTube channel, OpenAI president Greg Brockman gave the company's clearest public confirmation yet that it's building hardware — not one device, but what he called "a family of devices" built around its AI models. Brockman declined to name a specific product, confirm a ship date, or address the widely reported 2027 smart speaker, saying only that people "can expect them soon." He did confirm one concrete detail: OpenAI is designing its own chips — the same vertical-integration move Apple and Google made years ago to control performance, cost, and battery life on-device.

The bet: talking replaces typing

Brockman's broader claim is the more interesting one for builders — he expects voice to replace typing as the primary way people interact with their devices. That's not a new idea; Alexa and Siri chased it for a decade without displacing the keyboard. But OpenAI is making the bet with a model stack — real-time voice, agentic tool-use, long context — that wasn't available to the last generation of voice assistants. If that thesis holds even partially, it reframes what a "chat interface" means: less a text box bolted onto an app, more an always-available layer that calls tools and APIs directly.

The Apple lawsuit sitting next to this launch

The announcement lands about three weeks after Apple sued OpenAI, on July 10, alleging its hardware effort is "rotten to its core" and built in part on stolen trade secrets. The suit names Tang Tan, OpenAI's hardware chief and a former lead iPhone/Apple Watch designer at Apple, and Chang Liu, a former Apple engineer Apple says joined OpenAI without completing a proper exit process. It also names io Products — the startup founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive that OpenAI acquired for $6.5 billion to seed its hardware program — though Ive himself isn't named as a defendant. Asked about the suit, Brockman said OpenAI is "focused on our own development and technology" and has "no interest in other companies' trade secrets."

What it means for builders

None of this changes what ships today, but it's worth planning around two things:

• Treat conversational and agentic surfaces — voice, tool-calling, ambient AI — as a first-class interface, not an add-on bolted to a mobile app.
• Expect OpenAI hardware to run on its own silicon rather than off-the-shelf chips, which points toward a tighter, more Apple-like software/hardware coupling from that ecosystem.
• If you're building or hiring for a hardware-adjacent AI product, treat IP provenance and hiring documentation as seriously as the Apple-OpenAI suit suggests both companies now do.