OpenAI recruits legendary iPhone designer Jony Ive to work on AI
hardware in $6.5B deal
[May 22, 2025] By
MATT O'BRIEN and MICHAEL LIEDTKE
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — OpenAI has recruited Jony Ive, the designer behind
Apple's iPhone, to lead a new hardware project for the artificial
intelligence company that makes ChatGPT.
OpenAI said it is acquiring io Products, a product and engineering
company co-founded by Ive, in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion.
Ive became renowned for a meticulous design aesthetic that shaped the
cultural zeitgeist during a 27-year career at Apple, which he left in
2019. He did his most influential work after Apple co-founder Steve Jobs
returned to run the company in 1997, where the two forged a partnership
that would hatch a succession of game-changing products like the iPhone.
The new OpenAI deal now thrusts Ive at the vanguard of AI — a technology
driving the biggest industry shift since the iPhone’s arrival.
The company hasn't said exactly what product they will be making but
expect “physical AI embodiments” that bring generative AI chatbot
technology out of computer screens into another form, such as through a
car, humanoid robot or the AI-powered glasses being developed by
competitors Google and Meta, said Gartner analyst Chirag Dekate, adding
that it is too early to know for sure.
OpenAI said its CEO Sam Altman had been “quietly” collaborating since
2023 with Ive and his design firm, LoveFrom.
In a joint letter posted on OpenAI's website Wednesday, Ive and Altman
said it “became clear that our ambitions to develop, engineer and
manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company.”
That's when Ive co-founded io, which was incorporated in Delaware in
September 2023 and registered in California in April 2024, according to
state records. OpenAI said it already owns a 23% stake in io from a
prior collaborative agreement signed late last year. It says it will now
pay $5 billion in equity for the acquisition.
OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and LoveFrom will
remain independent but “will assume deep design and creative
responsibilities across OpenAI and io.” Both OpenAI and Ive's design
firm are based in San Francisco.
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Jony Ive attend The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute
benefit gala celebrating the opening of the "Superfine: Tailoring
Black Style" exhibition on Monday, May 5, 2025, in New York. (Photo
by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)
 Leading the new io division for
OpenAI will be longtime executive Peter Welinder, who led robotics
research in the startup's early years and more recently has been
vice president of its “new product explorations” team that delves
into hardware, robotics and other early stage research.
Altman, 40, can only hope his still-blossoming partnership with the
58-year-old designer, works out as well as the mind-meld between
Jobs and Ive.
When he started his own firm, Ive derived the LoveFrom name from
Jobs’ observation that one way to hail humanity is by “making
something with a great deal of care and love.”
Ive also chose to base LoveForm in a historic part of San Francisco,
located just near bars and cafes that were once frequented by such
Beat Generation luminaries as “On The Road” author Jack Kerouac and
“Howl” author Allen Ginsberg.
OpenAI is headquartered about two miles away. Founded nearly a
decade ago as a nonprofit research laboratory dedicated to safely
building better-than-human AI for humanity's benefit, it remains
controlled by a nonprofit board of directors even as Altman, its
co-founder, has increasingly pushed it toward commercializing
ChatGPT and its other inventions. It's not clear if Altman's
collaboration with Ive began before or after Altman's short-lived
ouster in November 2023, months after io's Delaware incorporation
but before the new business was set up in San Francisco.
Altman earlier this month said OpenAI was abandoning plans to drop
its nonprofit governance structure but is pursuing a plan to make
changes that would make it easier to access capital and pursue
mergers and acquisitions “and other normal things companies would
do."
——
O'Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.
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