OpenAI is building an AI-powered smart speaker nobody wants. That is, if you believe the Bloomberg report from Mark Gurman and you've read his description of said rumored device.

According to the report:

"OpenAI believes the product’s defining feature will be its personality and ability to connect on a humanlike level with users. The speaker incorporates mechanical elements that can move on their own, creating a sense that it is alive and not just an object responding to commands. The machine also will draw on personal information such as emails to better understand its owner."

The news sources, it appears, come from an insider who decided to spill all the juicy details mere hours after Apple dropped a blockbuster trade-secrets lawsuit on OpenAI's head. OpenAI claims it's done nothing of the sort, and recent reports say that Apple's claim that the AI giant has not even responded to Apple's earliest concerns was based on it potentially incorrectly identifying the former Apple employees who left to join OpenAI (allegedly with Apple trade secrets in tow).

Apple's concerns here are twofold: First, these former employees had access to many of Apple's secretive product development details and may even have asked recruits to share fresh details when they approached them to interview for jobs at OpenAI. The other concern is that Apple is already far behind in the AI race, and if Apple's plans for Siri, AI, and a potential robotic desktop home assistant were also leaked, it could harm its ability to catch up in multiple market sectors.

This latest news, which may or may not be accurate, should put Apple's fears to rest.

OpenAI is apparently not building something that could ably compete with any of Apple's key hardware or future hardware initiatives.

First of all, there's the smart-speaker-ness of the whole rumored OpenAI concept. There are already too many smart speakers on the market, many of them with their own smart assistants. Amazon, for instance, is smack in the middle of trying to convince millions of customers that not only do they need Echo devices throughout the home, but they need the AI-powered Alexa+ to guide them through their smart home experiences and, to some extent, their lives.

Apple has its own HomePod, Siri-infused speakers, which may get considerably more powerful with the Gemini foundation model-backed version arriving this Fall.

Put another way, smart speakers are a known quantity in the home consumer electronics space, and I think what most tech companies are realizing is that people like and use them, but mostly in limited ways: they want music, occasional answers to simple questions, and voice control of their smart home devices. That's it.

Why does my speaker think it's alive?

OpenAI appears to be prepared to offer something different: a personality-filled speaker that can watch you, move to engage, seem alive, and generally make you feel uncomfortable.

Obviously, that would not be the objective, but it could be the result. Who needs a speaker that quietly watches you as you walk from your kitchen to the den, waiting and hoping for you to say, "hey ChatGPT, what's up with the Strait of Hormuz today?"

In my home, we have a Psync smart security webcam with one oddball feature: it has a motorized body that can turn almost 360 degrees on its base and lift its thin, rectangular face and camera to keep track of people and alert me to intruders. However, most of the time, it's just watching us move around the house, and I can tell you that my family hates it. Sometimes I come home and find its face forced down so it can't pop up and track anything.

Now, imagine a larger and far smarter OpenAI AI smart speaker in your home, watching, waiting, chiming in when you don't want it to, and generally making people feel uncomfortable.

This will not be the breakout hardware hit OpenAI is hoping for.

Look, I was under the impression that OpenAI (really Jony Ive and Sam Altman) were working on an AI wearable. I didn't love that idea either, but it was a lot less creepy than this.

So, Apple, chill out. OpenAI's plans are no threat to you, even if they do allegedly have a bunch of insidery Apple information.

It all started with an email. Someone was reminding me about the fast-approaching National AI Day. I never finished the email but quickly wondered, "National AI Day, is that really a thing?" It is, and I found the man responsible for it.

"We have about 30,000 applications a year for new national days. From that, we have a committee of people look at them," said National Day Calendar.com founder Marlo Anderson when I reached him by phone just two days before the big July 16th event.

National AI Day, though, did not follow that traditional route when it was designated a day on their calendar in 2025. Anderson told me he does a lot of AI work with the business and has been using AI for 20 years, so he did something slightly unusual.

"We just figured having an AI day would be appropriate," he said and admitted he did the designating.

It is not the normal process, though Anderson believes, but could not specifically recall, that people had suggested the day in the past.

You made this list

It is a big deal to get added. After all, National Day Calendar only adds a handful each year and, as Anderson admitted, some already believe they have too many "National Days" (he noted that he might be among that cohort, too).

Still, Anderson, who founded National Calendar Day in 2013, believes AI warranted it. He explained that it's already responsible for much of the "mundane process" work they do, including uploading the National Day Calendar's daily videos to a platform called Video Elephant. They were uploading 100 clips as he spoke to me. Doing it by hand would take two weeks. With AI, "just one day or two."

As for which AI platforms Anderson uses, he seems to spread it around, telling me that Claude is used for app development and website maintenance, ChatGPT Voice for brainstorming projects, and Gemini in National Day Calendar offices in North Dakota.

Anderson is a firm believer in the power and potential of AI for both his own work and as an agent for good in the world. Locally, he told me, "If we have an agentic AI that can handle that workload for us, we should probably do it."

National Anti-AI Day

When I asked abotu the AI backlash — a recent study found 40% of surveyed peopel are limiting use of AI — Anderson told me, "We talk about it all the time," but added, "We get backlash on National Cheese Sandwich Day and French Fry Day," which is to say, he's not sure if the backlash is any greater than for other oddball National Days.

More seriously, Anderson is well aware of the debate about AI's impact on the environment but is also convinced the positives far outweigh the negatives.

"I also understand there’s a lot of benefit," like the ability to find medical cures. They're making, he told me, "remarkable progress right now" in medicine.

He then spun out an analogy about horses and cars. A million hours ago (in 1912), most people were still riding horses and, it turns out, they were pretty dangerous, too. Early cars, with the lack of traffic infrastructure, weren't much better, but "most people would agree a car is a better way to travel," he said, adding that we're currently "at the same crossroads with Artificial Intelligence."

Ultimately, Anderson's decision to create National AI Day was rooted in its current impact.

In 2025, "the conversation had heightened to a point where probably everyone knows about AI, at least in the US. Everyone is probably using it, whether they know it or not," he told me.

It's also about AI's long-term prospects.

When goat yoga was a big thing, Anderson explained, they had a lot of requests to make it a day. "There's no day because we assumed it would be a fad [he was quick to add he’s sure it’s wonderful]. 20 years from now, no one will know or talk about goat yoga, but 20 years from now, they will be talking about AI."

So happy National AI Day. Feel free to celebrate on July 16 by using it, deriding it, or ignoring it altogether.

The metal ball dropped 40 centimeters onto a hair-thin flexible Samsung display with a resounding, cringeworthy clunk, but it did not break, and yet that wasn’t the most remarkable thing. It was that I was the one dropping the ball, using one of Samsung Display’s own pieces of testing equipment, and I was doing so inside Samsung Display headquarters, a place where no media has gone before.

I’d come to South Korea for a wide-ranging Samsung Electronics product briefing and tours of its massive Gumi Digital City Factory and this first-ever look inside Samsung Display. With Samsung Unpacked now just days away (July 22) and new foldables anticipated, the visit would prove more than illuminating.

While obviously connected and working closely to deliver products like the Galaxy S26 Ultra and Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7 (and whatever comes next), they’re also separate, working in a partnership that also allows Samsung Display to supply displays to, for instance, Apple (more on those Apple folding phone rumors later).

Samsung Display is a display specialist operating in a vast and in some ways nondescript (and in other ways beautiful) factory that is just a stone’s throw away from its nearest competitor, LG Display, which works in South Korea with its partner LG Electronics in a similar fashion.

Most of Samsung Display's buildings are unattractive, brutalist monoliths, but the interiors feature some eye-popping examples of their work. Ironically, we were initially greeted by a conference-hall-sized display featuring our names, which Samsung Display did not build. But on an adjacent wall was an animated edifice of phones, tablets, TVs, and other screens that all tell the story of Samsung Display technology, one that has taken it from tiny feature-phone displays and tube TVs to the vast OLED panels and flexible displays featured in the latest foldables.

The ball-drop demo was part of a whistle-stop tour of Samsung Display's latest innovations and stress tests. I only dropped the 21.7-gram ball on the panel after watching a Samsung Display tech do it multiple times from a height of 30 centimeters on a 220lb machine that Samsung Display had moved into this small room just for this one demonstration.

However, Samsung seemed in the mood to open up, and we were soon visiting multiple rooms where Samsung Display puts panels through the wringer.

Following our guides, we hopped on a special elevator and soon were standing outside a 24-hour lab that’s running tests even when Samsung employees are asleep. “Only authorized technicians get in,” our guide warned us before unlocking the door with her ID and ushering us inside.

Many of these tests Samsung Display runs are designed to test “how long can I use it?” So, there are the folding and unfolding tests to the tune of thousands of times a day, and stress tests that heat the panels up to 60 degrees Celsius or cool them to minus 20 degrees Celsius. Many of the large gray or beige metal boxes where the tests are performed are sealed, so technicians must track the tests via video feeds from internal cameras.

But as I learned while touring other Samsung facilities, the company likes to automate these processes, so it’s often an unemotional computer that will recognize and report a failure.

Our next stop was another few levels down (B5, to be precise) where we saw image quality and reflection testing. The latter was interesting because, as is often the case, Samsung Display built a special rig, this one a barium sulfate-coated contraption to shine ultra-bright light on the panel and then use a spectrometer to read the light refracted back. For foldable displays, they even check how light bounces off the crease, which will, of course, affect visibility of the crease.

Samsung Display is also where they’re unsurprisingly pushing the boundaries of display technology. Company execs showed us a series of displays that, I think, speak to the future of many of our display-worthy electronics.

The first display, a visual trick of sorts, may have been my favorite. It looked like a small, bezel-less OLED screen showing off the inside of an ornate cathedral. However, when I got close and shifted my view to the left or right, I realized it was two displays sandwiched on top of each other; a small portion of the image was on the smaller display, and behind it was the complete image. Head-on, they seamlessly blend together.

This optical illusion only works because Samsung Display has figured out how to reduce its tolerances so much that the small gap necessary for electrodes and encapsulation is almost zero, meaning that the top display has no visible black border around it.

The other 7.2-inch displays were of the flexible variety. We saw screens flex, we saw them roll away, but the most interesting was the hybrid: a foldable and rollable screen, something that’s never been tried before.

As for when these displays might come to consumer devices, that’s hard to say, but it does seem inevitable. After all, I first saw Samsung flexible displays more than a decade ago, and now they’re part of a growing legion of consumer-grade foldable phones.

Display executive perspective

Later, we moved to another part of the vast facility for a sit-down with Samsung Display executives

Byung Duk Yang, EVP at Core Component Technology Team, Samsung Electronics and Kyung-jin Yoo EVP & Head of Mobile Display Product Development Team, Samsung Display.

Unquestionably, the bleeding edge of the work they do continues to be the foldable phone partnership with Samsung Electronics, where these innovations presented a series of unusual challenges, many of which the firm has overcome over seven generations of foldable devices (and whatever we expect to come next week at Samsung Unpacked).

“The two companies are always thinking about how we can continue to improve the usability of the foldable,” said Byung Duk Yang.

Yang talked about how these flexible devices and their folding screens introduced diverse user paradigms. Some of the work they do is figuring out how to handle challenges like drops, pressure, and collisions with heavy objects.

But it sounds like it’s been rewarding work and the company is undoubtedly committed to the foldable space. “The future of the foldable device is very promising,” said Byung Duk Yang. But when we asked about how soon some of those fold and slide screens might be in our hands, Samsung Display execs cautioned us, “We have to consider the real-world usage pattern. The display might be ready, but we should consider many aspects of the usage.

When we have confidence that we can deliver meaningful innovation to the user, then every other aspect of technology are ready, then we are going to list the product,” said Byung Duk Yang, who added that as an engineer, he knows they’re not ready.

When I asked, though, if there were any intrinsic barriers in folding displays to the introduction of the privacy display — a breakout feature for the Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra — the answer surprised me.

“We are exploring and we are thinking, when and how to implement the privacy display into foldable display. Because we know many people love the feature. We are thinking, considering,” smiled Yang.

Speaking of innovation, the Samsung Display execs revealed that, with the upcoming new line of foldables, it's introducing a new material, or rather, doubling the use of a material generally associated with strength and not flexibility: Titanium.

Samsung Displays described it as "Flex Titanium Technology," and what it means is that upcoming foldable Galaxy phones, which the company will reveal next week, will feature not one but two titanium layers.

One is an update to the relatively rigid one that's existed in previous Galaxy Fold models, with a new, special structure at the fold or crease to give flexibility and reduce crease visibility. The second, new, almost paper-like titanium alloy film replaces the polymer layer below the OLED in previous foldable devices and sits on top of the more rigid titanium plate. It's both thinner than that old polymer layer and, Samsung claims, more resilient.

"Polymer layers are good for flexibility but [we] want to minimize permanent deformation; titanium alloy has a much better quality to reduce permanent deformation,” they explained.

To help us visualize the new flexible display construction, Samsung Display brought out a bread-box-sized diorama, with each display layer hanging inside like a curtain. The new titanium polymer layer felt smooth, thin, light, and quite strong.

Naturally, we had to ask about Apple’s rumored foldable phone, which may be called the iPhone Ultra, and how Samsung Display might supply the screen. They wouldn’t comment on the rumors but did share, “I think it’s more than welcome because when the other competitors and other companies join the market, this market will be standard and the owners will increase….We really welcome the big competitor joining this market…

We mean it, we love other companies to join this market.”

Having spent decades covering Apple, I understand and respect its efforts to maintain a shroud of secrecy over its product development. Reading this line in the blockbuster Apple vs OpenAI lawsuit, I can hear the voices of countless Apple execs and PR people who, rightly or not, feel deeply wronged by what it considered a trusted partner: "OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets."

Late last week, Apple filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and, more specifically, a pair of key employees who, over the last two years, left Apple to join OpenAI's hardware business. The massive filing, which calls for a jury trial, accuses the pair of corporate espionage, essentially stealing a raft of trade secrets to help bolster OpenAI's still unrealized efforts to build AI hardware (it's currently working with Jony Ive to build what may eventually become a wearable device).

I've spent some time poring over the documents and, to be honest, the accusations are stunning and, if true, seem unaccountably brazen for people who spent years with the Cupertino tech giant.

From the inside out

Tang Yew Tan, who currently serves as OpenAI's Chief Hardware Officer, was at Apple for a quarter of a century and, according to his own LinkedIn profile, "Oversaw the design and development of iPhone and Apple Watch Product Design, Interconnects Design, Acoustics and Materials technology centers."

Chang Liu (whose LinkedIn handle is "changliu-apple") spent almost a decade as an iPhone Electrical Engineer.

Apple's NDA's that they hand to journalists like me are almost legendary (the first time I signed one, I swear my hands were shaking). I can only imagine the intensity of the Intellectual property agreements (IPAs) Apple says it asks employees to sign from time to time. The language is probably appropriately terrifying; it's hard to conceive of how Liu and Tan could ignore them, and yet, according to the lawsuit, that's exactly what the pair did both during their waning days at Apple and in the time after when they joined OpenAI.

OpenAI's only public response so far has been from its Director of Strategic Communications Drew Pusateri, who said on X, "We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere."

The company's co-founder and CEO Sam Altman also only obliquely referenced it on X when someone accused him of being afraid of Apple. He wrote, "I am not afraid of Apple, but I have tremendous respect for them. s-tier company." ("S-Tier" basically means "elite").

I won't ask you to read the full document and instead have cherry-picked the most eye-watering accusations:

A potentially sneaky exit

When Liu left Apple, he allegedly took his work laptop with him. If you've ever worked in a corporate environment, you know this is a no-no. Most companies will pursue you to the ends of the earth to retrieve that hardware and whatever corporate access and secrets it contains.

It gets worse

Lui apparently didn't shelve the old (we assume) MacBook. Instead, he, according to Apple, exploited a network vulnerability and used the system to access Apple network folders. If true, that's an incredibly bold move. Surely Liu would've known how Apple's internal forensics could discover what was accessed by whom and when.

Boasting

While allegedly downloading Apple's proprietary files (details on unreleased products, presentations, tech data, specs, and more), Liu may have messaged someone through the Apple-issued laptop, celebrating how he was pulling the wool over Apple's eyes with "LOL" and "so funny". Again, was Liu the most careless corporate spy ever? Who would boast when they know Apple would eventually stumble on these details?

Coaching recruits

Apple claims Liu was actually recruiting Apple employees and coaching them on how to gather data before leaving the company. He may have told them how to email themselves files before exiting Apple.

Now, I understand how some of your, say, personal data, can end up intertwined with corporate data and you may want to hold onto some of that. On the other hand, if you didn't keep a firm line between work and personal files, that's on you.

A real betrayal

Tang Yew Tan spent 25 years with Apple, and what he's being accused of has surely enraged and disappointed Apple. "Mr. Tan has been methodically using Apple’s confidential information to benefit OpenAI," claims Apple.

Like Lui and other Apple recruits, Tan may have emailed himself proprietary Apple info.

Using Apple codenames

Apple claims Tan is asking Apple recruits about upcoming projects using code names only Apple employees would know.

We have their OK

This one is kind of mind-blowing. Apple alleges that OpenAI has used Apple info to get a partner to apply a "specific trade-secret metal finishing technique," because they convinced the partner Apple was OK with them doing so.

Carry out

This last one might be the boldest move of all. Apple alleges that OpenAI instructed potential Apple recruits to bring everything from CAD files to actual prototypes or parts to OpenAI interviews.

That's a particularly stunning accusation, and again, just seems so reckless. What kind of corporate spies operate with this level of impunity?

Naturally, OpenAI will, at some point, respond properly to this lawsuit, perhaps with one of their own. Apple could also eventually settle this suit out of court. They've done so before with similar cases, though I don't think they were quite at this level.

Can they come back from this?

Whatever happens with this case, it's hard to imagine the Apple / OpenAI relationship, which is already somewhat fraught, survives.

For now, you can explicitly choose to use ChatGPT to handle requests in the new Siri in iOS 27 dev beta, and it's a key part of Image Playground and Visual Intelligence. Apple could pull those options and lean harder into its Google Gemini foundation Model partnership while this case works its way through the courts.

I don't think that will materially impact your iPhone experience, but the loss of direct access to those hundreds of millions of iPhone customers could hurt OpenAI, a company that, as Apple acknowledges, is trying to build its own hardware business.

Plus, if OpenAI loses, it could see a lot of the in-house hardware innovation potentially tied to Apple's work blocked from ever reaching consumer hands.

And, obviously, it'll be hard for the partnership to come back from this passage in the suit:

"Apple lacks visibility into what’s been happening behind closed doors at OpenAI, where such misconduct is normalized and exemplified by leadership. This much is clear, however: at every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI has been stealing Apple’s trade secrets and confidential information."