OpenAI Completes Acquisition of io Products

Following rumors about the browser 's launch, OpenAI has officially confirmed the completion of its acquisition of io Products , a startup co-founded by Jony Ive (formerly Apple's Chief Design Officer). The company, led by Sam Altman, plans to release an open AI model within the next week.

Still no details on the first device

OpenAI announced its acquisition of io Products on May 21 for approximately $6.5 billion. The original post was removed from the site following a temporary restraining order issued by a judge at iyO's request . It is now back online with this update:

We're thrilled to announce that the io Products, Inc. team has officially merged with OpenAI. Jony Ive and LoveFrom remain independent and have assumed significant design and creative responsibilities at OpenAI.

OpenAI will create a hardware team with io Products employees, based in San Francisco. Engineers, designers, and researchers will be tasked with designing AI devices, naturally with ChatGPT integrated. There's no information yet on the first product, which will be announced in 2026. What's certain is that it won't be a smartphone or a wearable (smart glasses or earbuds).

Meanwhile, OpenAI is busy with other short-term projects. One of them is the development of a Chromium-based browser with a ChatGPT-like interface and Operator integration. It's expected to be announced in the coming weeks.

A new open AI model is also planned for release, to be distributed by Hugging Face and other cloud providers, as well as Microsoft. According to The Verge's sources, it will have similar performance to the o3-mini with reasoning capabilities.