Ive and Altman tease OpenAI’s first device

Jony Ive says his first AI device for OpenAI is already prototyped and will be revealed within two years. Speaking onstage with Laurene Powell Jobs, Ive described the design as simple, joyful, and unintimidating, the kind of product people instinctively want to touch. Sam Altman echoed that sentiment, saying the moment he saw the newest prototype he thought, “That’s it.”

The device is being built at the studio Ive set up specifically for this project. Altman said the team stripped away anything unnecessary, imagining a product that understands everything a user reads, says, or thinks about and turns that into a natural interface.

OpenAI originally aimed to show its first hardware in 2026. Ive now hints it could come even sooner.

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The White House is putting its planned AI executive order on hold while it watches a separate battle play out in Congress. Republicans are attempting to add language to the National Defense Authorization Act that would block states from passing their own AI laws. The administration wants to see whether that effort succeeds before deciding whether to move forward with its own order.

The draft EO, first reported by The Information, would direct Attorney General Pam Bondi to create a litigation task force to challenge state AI rules. It also calls for the Commerce Department to limit some federal broadband funding for states that impose AI regulations.

The pause comes as the administration ramps up efforts to stop states from setting their own AI rules, even though the Senate voted 99–1 earlier this year against a similar idea. The backlash has been swift. Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene both criticized the plan, arguing that states should keep the power to regulate AI as they see fit.

A new X feature is exposing that some loud pro-Trump accounts with big followings are actually run from outside the U.S. The “About This Account” tool shows several MAGA-branded profiles posting from places like Nigeria, Pakistan and Thailand, raising fresh concerns about foreign influence and creators chasing X’s revenue-sharing payouts.

The feature labels where an account is based, though it can be affected by travel. After the rollout, some accounts were removed and others sparked confusion, including a brief wave of posts falsely claiming the Department of Homeland Security account was run from Israel.

X says the update is part of a push to help people verify what they see. The weekend reaction showed how quickly misinformation spreads, and how hard it is for users to tell what’s real amid rising AI-generated content and inauthentic accounts.

Investors are pouring billions into new AI startups led by big-name founders, but breaking through is getting harder. Competing in frontier AI now requires huge compute budgets, vast datasets and the ability to operate at a loss for years. That advantage still sits with incumbents like Google, Microsoft and Meta.

Several top researchers have recently left Big Tech to start their own labs. Yann LeCun is leaving Meta to build models that focus on real-world reasoning. Ilya Sutskever launched Safe Superintelligence with more than $1 billion in funding. Mira Murati founded Thinking Machines Lab. Jeff Bezos is now co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a heavily funded startup focused on manufacturing and hardware.

Even well backed teams still face the same bottleneck. Training frontier models can cost hundreds of millions of dollars and could soon hit the billion-dollar mark. Giants like Google and Microsoft can fund these investments from massive cash flows. Startups may need to borrow or partner early, and some could end up being acquired before their ideas fully mature.

The next wave of AI breakthroughs might come from these new labs, but only the ones with real staying power will survive the scale required.