None of the named companies have confirmed anything as of yet, and OpenAI didn't respond to Decrypt’s request for comments.
The market didn't wait. Qualcomm surged as much as 12% intraday on Kuo's note alone, almost erasing all the 2026 losses at its peak, even though the surge cooled a bit in the following hours.
The device Kuo describes isn't a phone with a chatbot icon. The idea is to kill apps entirely and replace them with an AI agent that handles tasks directly. "Only by fully controlling both the operating system and hardware can OpenAI deliver a comprehensive AI agent service," Kuo wrote. The chip would run a mix of on-device and cloud inference, with the phone tracking user context in real time.
Standalone AI hardware hasn't been kind to anyone who's tried building an AI-centric device. The Humane AI Pin was discontinued. The Rabbit R1 got torched in reviews. The premise that users will swap their existing phone for a purpose-built AI gadget has not been validated at any meaningful scale.
A multi-year, multi-billion-dollar smartphone program is the opposite of a focus reset.
The underlying logic isn't hard to follow. Apple's decision to design its own sillicon—chips tuned specifically for its software—gave it a performance edge no Android rival has matched. An OpenAI chip built around ChatGPT inference would cut out the compromises baked into a general-purpose Snapdragon, and remove Apple and Google from the equation when it comes to which AI features get system-level access.
