Humane AI Pin

Humane's AI Pin was a screenless wearable built around an AI assistant, priced from $699. It reached buyers in April 2024, and Humane stopped selling it 10 months later, on the day HP agreed to buy Humane's key AI capabilities for $116 million.

What it was

The Humane AI Pin was a wearable you controlled by voice, touchpad and gesture, with a laser display projected onto your palm in place of a screen.

Instead of apps and a keyboard, The Verge's review said, it put everything behind an AI assistant and an operating system Humane called CosmOS.

The Pin didn't need a phone. It ran on Humane's own mobile service through T-Mobile, and Humane's subscription page said you had to pay for that service, $24 a month, to use it.

Humane announced the Pin on November 9, 2023, starting at $699 for the complete system. TechCrunch later wrote that Humane positioned it as a smartphone replacement.

Humane was a Bay Area startup founded by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, both formerly of Apple. Bongiorno was its CEO.

What happened

The AI Pin shipped late to scathing reviews, and within weeks, The New York Times reported, Humane was in talks to sell itself.

Its ship date slipped from March to mid-April 2024, TechCrunch reported. The Verge's review, published April 11, said "it just doesn't work". Marques Brownlee called it "the worst product I've ever reviewed", The Verge reported.

By early April, Humane had around 10,000 orders against the 100,000 it hoped to sell that year, The New York Times reported. About a week after the reviews, according to the same report, Humane started talking to HP about selling itself for more than $1 billion.

Between May and August 2024, more AI Pins were returned than bought, according to internal sales data The Verge obtained. A source put the number still in customers' hands closer to 7,000. Humane's spokesperson said the report had inaccuracies, "including the financial data".

In October 2024, Humane cut the price by $200, to $499, TechCrunch reported. It also recalled about 10,500 of the Pin's charging cases over overheating concerns, The Verge reported.

On February 18, 2025, HP announced a $116 million deal for Humane's AI platform, technical staff and more than 300 patents and patent applications. The same day, Humane told customers it was winding the Pin down and ending sales effective immediately.

Humane said the Pins would lose calls, messages, AI answers and cloud access at 12pm PST on February 28, 2025. The Verge reported in May 2025 that Humane had "shut down all AI Pins in February".

Why it failed

Reporting and later analysis say the AI Pin shipped unfinished and cost too much for what it did.

What Humane said

Humane's notice to customers said it was winding the Pin down "as our business priorities have shifted". Its FAQ said Humane was "moving onto new endeavors" and would "share more in the future". Neither mentions sales, reviews or returns, and I found no later Humane statement that did.

On April 23, 2024, a post on Humane's site listed its priorities as "improving battery life and thermal management", then response time and accuracy. Bongiorno posted on X that "No gen 1 is perfect" on the day the bad reviews started to emerge, The Verge reported.

In October 2024, Om Malik wrote that the founders saw communication as what they could have done differently. Bongiorno told him the Pin "arrived when we said it would" and that, from that standpoint, she "wouldn't change a thing".

What reporting showed

The Verge's David Pierce reported that the Pin couldn't set an alarm or a timer, and that routing every request through Humane's servers made it "at best quite slow and at worst a total failure". Using it for more than a couple of minutes, he got an overheating warning. A Pin and a battery booster went from fully charged to dead in five hours, untouched in his backpack.

His advice to Humane was "if you're going to try to do phone things, just make a phone."

The Times reported that many current and former employees said the founders preferred positivity over criticism, leading them "to disregard warnings about the Ai Pin's poor battery life and power consumption". It also reported that a senior software engineer was let go after she questioned whether the Pin would be ready by April. The founders then told staff she had violated policy by talking negatively about Humane, two attendees said.

A small group of early testers, including the founders' parents and friends, several investors and employees, got Pins before launch, and many raised concerns, The Verge reported. One source said the feedback "ripped through the company like a bullet."

TechCrunch noted in April 2024 that the Rabbit R1, a rival device launched at CES in January, cost $200, "a fraction of the Ai Pin's $699 starting price". In May it wrote that the Pin "seemed to be a tough sell in a cash-strapped consumer market" and, in some ways, "a solution in search of a problem".

What later analysis found

Looking back the day after the HP deal, Pierce wrote that his 4 out of 10 had been "too generous". Humane ignored "panicked warnings from early testers" and shipped anyway, he wrote, and at $699 plus a mandatory $24 a month, "the Pin would have had to be great to be worth it."

Engadget's Nathan Ingraham wrote that it "wasn't really clear what the AI Pin would do to justify its $700 asking price". Google's and Apple's AI features are built on their existing platforms, he argued, and "In Humane's case, there was nothing to fall back on."

The stage it reached

Like OpenAI's Sora app, the Humane AI Pin never left the introduction stage, the launch period of the product life cycle when sales are small and most of them still need a demo or a free trial first.

Humane sent TechCrunch's Brian Heater home with a 30-minute intro video, which he wrote was "not the sort of thing most folks require when, say, upgrading a phone".

TechCrunch reported that Humane raised more than $230 million to create the device, and the internal data The Verge saw put lifetime sales of the Pin and its accessories at just over $9 million by August 2024. I read the $200 price cut that October as a rescue, not the price fall that comes with growth, and I found no report that sales picked up afterwards.

The lesson

I think the AI Pin's lesson is that a launch date isn't evidence that a product is ready. Within weeks of launch, Humane's own fix list started with battery life, which the Times reported its staff had warned about.

Write down what "ready" means before you set the date. Treat a warning from the people closest to the product as data, not negativity.

I'd also file the Pin under the first pattern in why AI projects fail, a solution looking for a problem. At $699 plus $24 a month, it had to do something your phone couldn't, and I don't think it ever found that thing.