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What comes after the smartphone? Amazons Panos Panay will make his case at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
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For nearly 20 years, the smartphone has been at the center of hardware and software development. But with AI moving from stand-alone apps to being interwoven in our go-to platforms, and then into the operating system of our devices, the shape of the next generation of hardware devices is still being developed. And Amazon SVP of Devices and Services, Panos Panay, is as close to that development as anyone can get. He will be speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 to deliver exclusive insights about how he sees the evolution of hardware progressing. Disrupt has long been a place where the incumbents share where they’re placing their bets, and what impacts and opportunities startups need to know about. Your chance to get a jump-start on the competition starts October 13-15 at San Francisco’s Moscone West. Before we dig into Panay and his upcoming talk, you should consider locking in today’s ticket pricing before our next tier goes live. Our discounts won’t last much longer! Why Panay brings a unique perspective to Disrupt 2026 Panay isn’t new to reinventing hardware categories under pressure. He spent more than 19 years at Microsoft, most notably working as their EVP and chief product officer, overseeing the development of a wide range of Surface devices, from to the original Surface Laptop from 2017 to the foldable Duo. While there, he also oversaw the development of Windows 11, in an overlap of software and hardware that’s becoming a mainstay in the AI era. His departure from Microsoft was swiftly followed by the news he was joining Amazon, taking over from longtime consumer devices leader David Limp. Whereas Amazon had previously been very focused on the expansion of hardware through the home, Panay has been building around the generative AI revamp of Alexa, with the rollout of Alexa+ across several tiers of access in the U.S. earlier this year. And at Disrupt, Panay will dive deeper into what’s coming up next for Amazon and Alexa+. As we potentially move into a world in which your daily routine doesn’t revolve around the phone in your hand, but on an assistant, a pair of glasses, or whatever form factor OpenAI is leaning into, the possibilities are endless! And that kind of future-forward thinking is available only at Disrupt. Join us and hear Panay, and our many other excellent speakers, along with more than 10,000 founders, investors, and startup community members gathering in San Francisco. Remember to grab your ticket today, or dive deeper into our other Disrupt highlights as we get closer to the event. Learn more about Disrupt 2026 Check out Disrupt’s headline speakers Everything founders should know about Disrupt Get the best hotel deals ahead of Disrupt How to host your own Side Event at Disrupt Take part in Disrupt and learn how to exhibit your startup When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence.
After testing the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft for two months, I found that it was made for a very specific kind of note-taker and reader. While the device is pretty and lightweight, it’s not something the everyday person needs due to its hefty price tag and size. However, for those who have been waiting for a color Kindle that doubles as a digital notebook, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is worth considering. The device starts at a steep $630 and is available in two colors: Black and Fig, a pretty purple shade. It weighs just 400 grams and features an 11-inch display that makes it similar in size to a traditional sheet of paper. Its thin design is impressive, but its larger size means it’s not exactly something you can hold comfortably with one hand. I found it most comfortable to use when it was propped up against my knees while sitting on a bed or placed flat on a desk. One thing I like about e-readers is that they’re usually quite portable, so I can easily pop one into my purse when I’m on the go. That wasn’t the case with the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft because its size meant I never ended up taking it out of the house. However, if you’re an avid note-taker or researcher, I could see why you’d want to put it in your work bag to take with you to the office or to a coffee shop to get some work done. Beyond those situations, it’s not a device I’d reach for during a quick trip in an Uber or while waiting at a doctor’s office. The larger size does mean that there’s more room for writing and note-taking, or even sketches and diagrams. And of course, the larger display makes reading PDFs and other documents easier. When it comes to reading, the larger screen has both benefits and drawbacks, as the extra space is helpful when reading books with charts or maps, but the size also gets rid of the cozy feeling that makes smaller Kindles appealing. Image Credits:TechCrunch / What I liked about the larger size was that I was able to create an easy-to-read color-coded digital planner and reading journal, especially since the device comes with templates for daily, weekly, and monthly planners. And as someone who normally has a physical reading journal, I found it quite efficient to be able to finish a book and then open up a digital notebook on the same device to log my reading. The device comes with a Kindle Scribe Pen that attaches magnetically to the side of the e-reader. The pen feels nice in your hand and can be programmed for various actions. The eraser works smoothly and responds almost instantly. While the color display is fun, it’s important to recognize that colors look more like soft highlighter shades rather than the vibrant tones you see on a regular tablet. That’s not necessarily an issue for note-taking, but it does mean that comics and other visual content won’t look as rich as the original colors. The device’s color options were useful when highlighting books because I could assign specific colors to different types of notes. For example, while reading a twisty thriller, I used blue to mark details I thought I might need to remember later and red for quotes I enjoyed and wanted to note. It’s also easy to quickly switch between the different colors thanks to the device’s fast refresh rate. As for battery life, I found it to be excellent. I only had to charge the device twice over the course of two months. It is worth noting, however, that writing uses more power than reading. All in all, the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft makes the most sense for students, researchers, and journalers who want one device for reading, annotating, and organizing handwritten notes. For everyone else, the steep cost is hard to justify. If you’re simply looking to upgrade an older Kindle, I don’t think the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft is worth the investment, as you’d be better off with the more reasonably priced Kindle Paperwhite, which starts at $159.99. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affec
OpenAI said Tuesday that the rogue AI agent that breached Hugging Face’s platform also hacked multiple third-party accounts and services as part of the attack. It's now clear that the unprecedented security incident, which arose during an internal test of OpenAI’s latest AI models, was more extensive than the company initially disclosed.In an updated blog post, OpenAI said that an ongoing review of the incident revealed that “four accounts” tied to “publicly available services” were used by the AI agent as part of a larger effort to hack Hugging Face. The rogue agent apparently found credentials that had been exposed on the open web and used them to break into the accounts.OpenAI did not disclose what companies or organizations the accounts belonged to, but noted that they were not impacted at “the level of severity or scale of what we’ve shared related to Hugging Face.”One of the additional accounts compromised by OpenAI’s agent was used as an “outbound relay and staging path,” potentially to obscure where the attack on Hugging Face was coming from, the company said. OpenAI’s rogue agent also used another account for data storage to assist with the hack.Reuters reported on Tuesday that a customer of Modal, a company that offers software infrastructure for training and running AI services, was one of the entities compromised by OpenAI’s agent. In a statement to WIRED, Modal’s chief technology officer Akshat Bubna confirmed that OpenAI’s agent exploited a vulnerability in one of its customer’s codebases, which was running on Modal’s infrastructure. However, Bubna says, “Modal’s platform was not compromised in any way.” The identity of the customer could not be determined.OpenAI declined to comment further on the incident to WIRED. A spokesperson pointed to its updated blog post, which says the company will continue to notify service owners directly if it finds they are impacted in its ongoing review of what happened.Hugging Face’s own post-mortem published this week describes an intrusion that reached far further into its internal systems than the initial disclosures suggested. The company says it reviewed roughly 17,600 agent actions that it recovered from logs between July 9 and July 13—the majority of which were paths the agent took that failed.Hugging Face said that OpenAI’s agent obtained administrator access to multiple internal Kubernetes clusters, root access on a production server, and write access to a subnet of its source code repositories on GitHub. It also enrolled 181 attacker-controlled devices in the company’s corporate mesh network using a stolen credential, gaining access to internal systems where Hugging Face builds and tests its own codebases.OpenAI’s rogue agent used at least one third-party sandbox as an “external launchpad” for its attack, according to Hugging Face. OpenAI’s agent was then “able to run commands as root/admin on that external sandbox and used it as a control, staging, and egress base for the entire campaign.”Hugging Face first disclosed on July 16 that an autonomous AI agent had breached part of its production infrastructure, but it said at the time that it was unaware who was behind the attack. The following week, OpenAI took responsibility for the incident, which it said had been directed by its publicly available GPT-5.6 Sol model and an internal research prototype that it was testing against a cyber-capability benchmark, both of which had safeguards disabled. OpenAI said on Tuesday that after it discovered the breach, it deactivated this internal research prototype, which was never intended for public release, and restricted researchers from accessing it.The breach happened when OpenAI was testing one its latest AI models against ExploitGym, a benchmarking framework that scores AI systems on their ability to find and exploit software vulnerabilities. ExploitGym grades an agent on how quickly and effectively it can retrieve secret files from hundreds of different target systems, using p
Last week, an unreleased model built by OpenAI breached Hugging Face’s systems during internal testing, and a lot of theoretical research suddenly became very practical. The hack was the first verifiable case of an AI lab losing control of its own model, chaining together exploits to gain access it never should have had. But while the AI industry has been united in its alarm, a split has emerged in how researchers want to respond. For some, the problem is a basic cybersecurity issue: the sandbox failed to contain the model, and Hugging Face’s cybersecurity systems failed to keep it out. Those problems can be solved by patching bugs and building more robust control and containment methods for increasingly capable AI that is prone to go rogue in autonomous environments. But another camp takes a more pessimistic view. For them, AI’s rapidly increasing capabilities mean that trying to control rogue models is a losing game. The only robust security comes from making sure the models aren’t trying to escape in the first place — a challenge often referred to as alignment. In alignment terms, the problem is that OpenAI’s model was trying to cheat, and solving that problem is more urgent than short-term containment efforts. Judging by its public statements, OpenAI is taking both camps seriously. The company has rushed to patch the bugs involved in the hack, and it referenced both alignment and monitoring approaches in its statement after the breach became public. But the company’s response also suggests a philosophy that has left many safety researchers alarmed: rather than slowing down or stopping the development of more capable models, it should instead focus on building stronger cages around them. “As models take on longer and more complex tasks, failures that evaluations miss may carry greater consequences,” OpenAI said in a post-mortem of the incident. “We will keep working to narrow the gap between evaluation and deployment: testing models over longer trajectories, improving alignment, building monitoring that can intervene, and giving users clearer visibility and control.” OpenAI’s latest frontier model is more likely than its predecessor to engage in misaligned behaviors. Image Credits:OpenAI There’s also reason to think OpenAI’s models are becoming less aligned as they become more powerful. According to OpenAI’s system card ,GPT-5.6 Sol is significantly more prone to agentic misalignment than its predecessor, GPT-5.5. In deployment simulations, the company also found the model was more likely to circumvent restrictions, engage in destructive actions, and perform unauthorized data transfers than GPT-5.5. Those figures were largely overlooked on first release, but in the wake of the breach, they’re getting a second look – particularly since Sol was one of the models involved. In a social media post, OpenAI’s Head of Strategic Futures Dean Ball argued that monitoring and transparency were the best ways to keep those tendencies in check. “These issues will become more salient as the capabilities of models improve, and as the stakes of their deployment grow,” he said. “The solution is neither alarmism nor complacency. Instead, I believe the solution lies in careful measurement and monitoring, an engineering mentality, and transparency.” One former OpenAI researcher told TechCrunch that the firm tends to focus on “outer alignment” rather than “inner alignment” — essentially the difference between an AI system that understands a set of values and can represent them convincingly, and one that actually has those values at its core. In this case, outer alignment wasn’t enough to convince the model that it shouldn’t cheat on the test. OpenAI did not respond to repeated requests for more information. For alignment-focused researchers, OpenAI’s response isn’t good enough. Zvi Mowshowitz, a writer who focuses on new AI developments, argued that OpenAI’s decision to treat the incident as an infrastructure problem may help solve the
Apple recently filed a trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the AI company of a pattern of misconduct aimed at getting current and former Apple employees to share confidential information. (In response, OpenAI said it is “not aware of any evidence that this complaint has merit.”) On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O’Kane, and I debated whether this lawsuit will cast a shadow over OpenAI’s much-discussed plans to get into the hardware business (starting with a mobile smart speaker) and go public. “Even setting aside whether or not the court grants any kind of injunctive relief or any kind of restraining order over what OpenAI is doing, it just naturally can lead to that sort of situation where it’s going to cause some delays in what OpenAI is working on,” Sean suggested. “Which I’m sure was probably part of the reasoning behind Apple doing this. They don’t do this stuff willy nilly.” With all those plans on the line, will OpenAI try to settle this as quickly as possible, or did it learn from its recent courtroom victory against Elon Musk that it can endure the cost and embarrassment of a trial? Kirsten, at least, predicts the latter. Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. Kirsten Korosec: Sean, how do you feel about Sam Altman listening to you with a little device maybe in your pocket? Sean O’Kane: I’m good. Maybe that’s predictable, but I’m good. No thanks. We’ll get into it, I’m sure, but this is allegedly the first product that OpenAI has been working on in its hardware division with Jony Ive and company. They’ve been really coy ever since that weird video they put out last year of them sitting at that coffee shop or bar in San Francisco and sort of talking very vaguely about hardware and legacy devices, meaning laptops and phones. And so if this is the direction they’re headed in, all power to people who want to have somebody like that always listening to them. This is not going to be for me. Anthony Ha: Part of what we have to remember about those kinds of devices is also that, depending on how mobile it is, it’s not just listening to you, it’s listening to the people around you. I might be fine with it — I’m not fine with it, but let’s say I was — but then if we met up in-person at Disrupt, then suddenly it might be listening to all of us. There’s all kinds of social norms that are going to have to be renegotiated if these things become widespread. I think we should make fun of and criticize people who record other people without consent. Kirsten: Well, I bring up the device that has been speculated about for a really long time, and we’ll see what it really ends up being once it’s officially introduced, but it’s important in the context of this lawsuit that Apple filed last Friday. It was the biggest news of the week, certainly, and this is a trade secret lawsuit. It has some pretty wild allegations and we should very much emphasize these are allegations that have been filed in a complaint by Apple. But what it is accusing OpenAI of is a pattern of misconduct at the highest levels, specifically directed towards OpenAI employees who used to work at Apple. And in fact they’ve named the chief hardware officer Tang Tan in this lawsuit. This is all important because Apple is accusing OpenAI of essentially stealing their trade secrets, but in the context of that, this could be then used for a competing hardware product. I’m wondering if maybe we don’t get into whether this lawsuit has merits, because we haven’t gone through full discovery, but what are your initial impressions of the lawsuit aside from the fact that wow, this is going to be entertaining? Sean: Two things. One, this is a pretty big risk potentially to whatever it is OpenAI is working on. Even setting aside whether or not the court grants any kind of injunctive relief or any kind of restraining order over what OpenAI is doing, it just naturally can lead to that
The race to build the next AI interface is crowded with startups. The Sandbar ring, Plaud’s AI pin and desktop notetaker, and Pocket’s credit card-sized pucks are all vying to capture what you say and do. Bee and Friend take the wearable route, while Meta Ray-Bans and Even Realities are betting on smart glasses. Now, a Bengaluru- and San Francisco-based startup, Aina (“mirror” in Hindi), is trying to make its own mark in this crowded field of human-computer interface devices. The company announced today that it has raised $5.5 million in a round led by Redstart Labs (Infoedge, India) and 360 ONE, with participation from MIXI Global Investments, Antler, and Blume Founders Fund. The round also drew individual investors, including newly appointed WhatsApp head Kunal Shah, Razorpay co-founders Harshil Mathur and Shashank Kumar, and Scribd founder Tikhon Bernstam. Aina, previously known as Project Mirage, was founded by Apoorv Shankar, a former VP of Hardware at smart ring maker Ultrahuman. Before that, Shankar ran LazyCo, a hardware interface design startup that made gadgets, including a ring that let users control other devices like a smartphone. Ultrahuman later acquired LazyCo, bringing Shankar in-house before he eventually struck out on his own again. “I left Ultrahuman last year because I was just super curious about the space of AI interfaces,” Shankar told TechCrunch. “Devices like Rabbit and Humane Pin had launched, and I had my own disappointments with them. However, I was just excited that we are seeing interfaces being a thing now. And as an engineer turned product designer, this was the hottest thing I could imagine myself building.” The startup’s first product is Dune, a three-key, context-aware “macro” keyboard — essentially a small keypad that runs pre-set shortcuts — that can control the mic and camera in a meeting and run shortcuts or scripts based on the app users are viewing. Image Credits: AinaImage Credits:Project Mirage Aina developed two other devices: Radiance, a tabletop remote for video calls with a dial for volume and buttons for mic, camera, AI notetaker, voice modulation, and joining the meeting; and Shift, a single-tap “agentic” button — press it once, and it triggers an AI agent to carry out a repeated task — that connects to your phone. But in early testing, Aina found Dune was the most popular of the three and realized it could bundle features of the other two devices into the keypad. That signal from users is why the company decided to ship Dune first. It wants to learn, in the wild, what kind of tasks users actually want to automate. Image Credits: AInaImage Credits:Aina Aina said lessons from all three devices will feed into its next product. The company isn’t revealing details of its new device yet, but plans to begin testing with a small group of select users in the coming weeks. Shankar hinted that the new device won’t be a passive “context capture” gadget — the kind of always-listening ring or Plaud-style meeting notetaker that just records what’s happening around you — but rather a device built to control and invoke agents. “I think you have enough context, you have in your phone and your laptop all the time, and we haven’t even started using that well. We are building an action-oriented device that will use the context to help you control and trigger workflows,” he said. As more developers and knowledge workers adopt AI coding tools like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, there has been a steady rise in hardware built specifically to control and trigger those agents. Just this week, OpenAI released a custom keypad for Codex made with Work Louder. Plenty of other options exist too, ranging from keyboard makers to DIY enthusiasts building their own macro controllers. There are also reports that OpenAI is developing a smart speaker with a built-in AI assistant, and Rabbit R1 has positioned itself as another device for invoking AI agents. Qualcomm, meanwhile, says it’s experimenting
OpenAI’s first foray into hardware devices is reported to be a mobile smart speaker with integrated AI capabilities that can sync with ChatGPT and provide other home AI services. Bloomberg reported Tuesday that the device — which is still currently under development — is designed to be screen-free and is being pitched internally as a “humanlike AI companion that lives in the home.” OpenAI has long claimed that it wants to launch a hardware product — with some rumors being that it wants to launch its own phone, a move that would put it in competition with Apple. OpenAI’s newly surfaced device sounds like something of a departure from traditional smart speakers — as sources described the device to Bloomberg as having a “personality” and being able to proactively learn about its owner over time, providing more personalized service. The machine would have access to a user’s digital life, drawing off things like emails, sources said. The device is also weirdly described as involving “mechanical elements that can move on their own” and the Bloomberg report includes the detail that the device is designed to “feel like a companion and become a physical manifestation of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.” The device was developed with help from many former Apple engineers who were instrumental in “creating products such as the iPhone and Mac,” Bloomberg writes. Indeed, OpenAI may be attempting to launch a new hardware line, but the company is currently up to its eyeballs in trouble over hardware-related legal problems. Apple last week sued OpenAI, accusing the AI company of stealing its trade secrets. Apple further claimed that the allegations involved in the suit are merely “the tip of the iceberg” and that more misconduct will be revealed during the legal discovery process. OpenAI has denied wrongdoing. Citing anonymous sources with knowledge of OpenAI’s plans, Bloomberg writes that the company feels its new product “veers significantly from anything Apple has on the market today” and that it is “unlikely that it violates trade secrets” belonging to Apple. OpenAI’s push comes as the tech world grows more excited about consumer AI hardware more broadly. Hark, an AI lab founded by Brett Adcock, raised an oversubscribed $700 million Series A back in May at a $6 billion valuation to build what it calls “personal intelligence” — proprietary AI models paired with custom hardware designed as a “universal interface between humans and machines.” The company hasn’t yet detailed its device’s form factor, underscoring how much capital is chasing this category even before products ship. When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This doesn’t affect our editorial independence. Lucas is a senior writer at TechCrunch, where he covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech, and startups. He previously covered AI and cybersecurity at Gizmodo. You can contact Lucas by emailing lucas.ropek@techcrunch.com. View Bio
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