OpenAI reportedly thinks its phone will sell as many units as the Samsung Galaxy series

Phones are overstuffed with AI that’s a secondary thought, slowing them down and eating up battery life. But ChatGPT maker OpenAI is working on creating a phone that’s AI-first, and now, it seems, it’s on the fast track.

Tech market analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who was the originator of the phone rumor to begin with, believes the phone will go into mass production starting in early 2027, as reported by MacRumors. Kuo first said that production would not begin until 2028.

MacRumors now quotes Kuo as saying that "[i]f development stays on track, combined 2027-2028 shipments could reach around 30 million units.”

That number is in line with sales from the Samsung Galaxy S25’s first year.

Agents everywhere

The OpenAI phone is unsurprisingly supposed to be agentic-based, moving away from the app-focused approach that we’ve grown accustomed to.

To support this model, Kuo says that OpenAI is going for a fully proprietary phone, creating both the hardware and the operating system. According to Kuo, it will use a customized version of MediaTek’s Dimensity 9600 processor, which is expected to launch in the third quarter of this year.

The apple might not fall far from the tree

Though Jony Ive, former Apple design guru, has “assumed deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI” since July of last year, there has been no word of him working on the look of OpenAI’s phone.

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What Ive is working on there is a mystery. As far as anyone outside the company knows, or at least has said, he’s either diligently trying to bring to market a screen-free, wearable agentic AI pin along the lines of the failed Humane AI Pin or the Rabbit r1 or he’s creating a smart speaker with a camera.

Whether the man who created the look of the iPhone transforms into the man who creates the look of the AI phone remains to be seen.

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