OpenAI buys io for $6.5 billion and hires Jony Ive

OpenAI has announced its acquisition of io, the young device company founded by Jony Ive, in an all-stock deal valued at $6.5 billion. It is Sam Altman’s company’s largest acquisition and the clearest sign yet that it wants to design its own products so people can use artificial intelligence in a different way.

Ive, the British designer who shaped much of Apple’s identity for decades, will take on design and creative responsibilities at OpenAI alongside LoveFrom, his independent studio. The stated goal is not to update the phone, computer or an existing app, but to explore a new category of AI-focused devices.

From the iPhone to a device built for AI

Jony Ive left Apple in 2019 after nearly 30 years at the company. As its design chief, he worked on products that helped define consumer computing, including the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. His arrival gives OpenAI a capability that is unusual among AI model companies: the experience to turn complex technology into an object that millions of people understand and want to use.

Ive founded io about a year ago with Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan. Hankey was Apple’s head of industrial design, while Tan led product design teams at the company. According to OpenAI’s announcement, the team includes about 55 engineers, designers, researchers and manufacturing specialists.

The $6.5 billion figure includes the roughly 23% stake OpenAI already held in io. The rest of the transaction will be completed in OpenAI stock. Beyond the financial size of the deal, the acquisition brings into the company a team used to solving problems that a language model cannot handle on its own: battery life, materials, cameras, microphones, industrial production, privacy and an interface that does not require users to learn a manual.

The screen remains the limit

AI assistants can already hold voice conversations, interpret images, summarize documents and carry out some tasks. Yet they almost always reach users through inherited interfaces: a chat window, a mobile app or a browser. OpenAI argues that this way of using the technology remains constrained by products designed before computers could understand language and images.

Altman and Ive’s thesis is that AI can justify a different kind of interaction. They have not shown a product or detailed its form, features or launch date. That caution matters: not every AI device needs to replace the phone, and the category still lacks a proven formula.

Recent precedents suggest tempering expectations. Humane’s AI Pin tried to bring an AI assistant to a screenless device, but drew criticism for its limitations, and Humane ended up selling part of its assets to HP this year. Rabbit R1, another portable device pitched as an alternative to apps, has likewise failed to show that there is mass demand for a device separate from the phone.

OpenAI’s challenge will not simply be to create an assistant that responds well. It will have to decide when to listen, what data to store, how to avoid interruptions and which tasks are worth delegating to a system that can make mistakes. In hardware, a design or trust failure cannot be fixed as easily as a software update.

A deal that also affects Apple

The acquisition brings OpenAI closer to the territory that has given Apple its greatest power: a direct relationship with consumers through the device. Apple has integrated Apple Intelligence features into its products and maintains a partnership with OpenAI to offer ChatGPT in some of those experiences. At the same time, the acquisition of io puts one of the designers most closely associated with Apple at the helm of a potential competitor in the next generation of computing interfaces.

For now, OpenAI has not unveiled the device or promised to replace the smartphone. What it has bought is time, talent and a recognizable design direction as it tries to answer a question the industry has yet to resolve: what device feels natural when computing no longer depends entirely on touching a screen.