The AI Pin Goes Dark: HP Buys Humane's Remains for $116M

Humane announced on Tuesday that HP has acquired most of its assets for $116 million. The startup is immediately halting sales of its $499 AI Pin, and — far worse for anyone who already bought one — it will shut down its servers within days. Starting February 28 at 12 p.m. Pacific time, the devices will simply stop working.

This isn't a service downgrade or a partial withdrawal of support: it's the total death of the product. According to the company's announcement, after that date the pins won't be able to connect to Humane's servers at all, meaning no calls, no messages, no AI queries or responses, and no cloud access. Humane is urging customers to transfer their photos and important data to an external device as soon as possible, because after the cutoff there will be no way to get them back.

A device that dies completely, not by halves

The technical detail here matters more than it might seem. The AI Pin was built from the ground up to depend on the cloud: almost everything it did — processing voice, answering questions, handling communications — ran through the company's servers. When those servers go dark, you're not left with a stripped-down gadget. You're left with an inert object.

That's the difference between an abandoned smartphone, which at least keeps making calls and running local apps, and a device that only ever existed as a terminal for a remote service. The AI Pin falls into the second category, and its disconnection leaves buyers holding a $499 paperweight.

Humane will also dissolve its customer support team on February 28. Refunds will be available, but only in very limited cases: they're reserved for customers who bought a Pin in the last 90 days. Anyone who bought one earlier is out both the money and the device.

From smartphone killer to commercial flop

Humane burst onto the scene with plenty of fanfare in April 2024, launching the AI Pin and pitching it as a replacement for the smartphone. The Bay Area startup, founded by ex-Apple employees Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, had raised more than $230 million to build the device. On paper, the pitch was bold: a screenless, voice-driven, AI-powered gadget you wear on your clothes.

The reality disappointed a good chunk of early reviewers and customers, and that's what set off the company's crisis. At one point last summer, returns of the AI Pin began outpacing sales, according to reporting from The Verge. Bad press wasn't the only problem — Humane also told customers to stop using the device's charging case over battery fire concerns. In October, the company, which had long charged $699 for the AI Pin, cut the price by $200.

The scale of the collapse becomes clearer when you look at what Humane once thought it was worth. In May 2024, the company was seeking a buyer at a much higher price — somewhere between $750 million and $1 billion, according to a Bloomberg report. The deal that finally closed, at $116 million, is less than a sixth of the low end of that original ambition, and doesn't even cover the $230 million the company had raised from investors.

What HP is really buying: the brains and the software, not the pin

The deal makes clear what interested HP and what didn't. The company is taking on Humane's engineers and product managers, who will form the core of a new internal group called HP IQ, described as an "AI innovation lab focused on building an intelligent ecosystem across HP's products and services for the future of work."

HP is also acquiring part of Humane's technology, including its AI operating system, CosmOS. The startup had recently shown an ad demonstrating that operating system running on a car's entertainment system, a smart speaker, a TV, and an Android phone. That technology, according to HP, could be used to bring AI into its PCs and printers.

Put plainly: HP isn't buying the AI Pin. It's buying the talent and the software behind it. The hardware that defined Humane — the physical object that was supposed to be revolutionary — is exactly what's being scrapped and switched off. This is a deal for people and intellectual property, an acqui-hire with a technology license attached, not a product rescue.

The first 'AI hardware' bubble deflates

Humane's shutdown marks the end of a specific chapter: the standalone AI device that was going to retire the phone. Throughout 2024, the idea took hold that generative AI demanded new forms of hardware — gadgets designed from scratch to converse with an assistant instead of tapping a screen. Humane was the most visible standard-bearer of that bet, and also the most expensive.

The outcome carries a warning that goes beyond one startup. Any device that depends entirely on someone else's servers to function inherits a risk the buyer doesn't control: if the company shuts down or changes hands, the gadget can turn into junk overnight. It's not a failure specific to the AI Pin, but of a model in which the customer buys hardware but, in effect, only rents its usefulness.

For HP, the move makes sense: it absorbs a team with experience integrating AI into consumer hardware, plus an operating system it can carry over to products it already sells by the millions. For AI Pin owners, though, the lesson arrives late and expensive. They have until February 28 to save their data before the device they paid hundreds of dollars for stops responding — for good.