Humane's AI Pin: A Cautionary Tale of Wearable AI Ambition

AI Pin Startup Humane Shuts Down and Sells to HP

The flashy AI pin was one of the first AI wearables on the market, but it was overpriced, weak, and slow, and the company is now dead. On paper, the Humane AI pin didn't seem like a terrible idea. It was a stylish little device meant to put AI right on your lapel, designed by former Apple employees and launched in April 2024 -- right as consumer AI tools started going mainstream. Hold your finger against it and it would take pictures, search the web, tell you information about the world around you, summarise and respond to emails and texts, make phone calls, and play music. It even had a small built-in laser projector, which could put media controls and small text information onto your hand. If you felt that you used your phone too much, the Humane Pin seemed to provide much of the same functionality but with far less hassle and distraction. On paper, that all seems promising. But there were many, many problems. For one, it couldn't call or text contacts from your regular phone number, but from a new number, courtesy of that Pin's in-built SIM, which cost $24 a month, which you needed for it to work. With a mandatory subscription of $280 a year, you would think the device would be relatively inexpensive, or even free like Whoop. But no. The Pin retailed for $700; the same as many new phones, all of which can run AI chatbots on them, and have all the same functionality as the Humane Pin. That might be justifiable if the Pin was any good. But it wasn't. When you asked it a question, the Pin would take an eon to respond, and when it eventually did, the answer was usually catastrophically wrong. This didn't improve over the product's short life either, as there were no meaningful updates. On the contrary, at one point, Humane told customers to stop using the charging case as it presented a fire risk. Also, given that this is the last time I will likely ever write about this product, it's worth remembering that it launched with a seemingly fraudulent TED talk, where Humane faked the Pin's capacity for real-time translation and answering; and then followed that with an unnerving reveal video, which included man notable factual errors. In short, it's one of the most disastrous tech products released since the exploding Samsung Galaxy Note 7. And less than a year after its release, Humane is dead. Reports started circulating late last year that Humane was looking for a buyer, and they found it in HP. Before announcing their product, Humane had raised 240M in funding from investors like Salesforce's Marc Benioff and OpenAI's Sam Altman, on a valuation of $850M. A year or so later, HP bought it for parts for $116M; which still seems dramatically overvalued. The companies founders now have a new job at HP, running an internal AI lab. Their roughly 10,000 former customers, though, are not so lucky. Humane will not refund customers for their devices, and the servers and AI functionality will shut down promptly. They were happy to inform owners that offline functionality will remain. The off-line functionality they cited was the ability to check the device's battery level. Otherwise, it's now the world's fanciest, most over-funded, expensive paperweight.

So You Bought a Humane Ai Pin. Here's What You Can Do Next

If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED As of today, the Humane Ai Pin is dead -- less than a year since its launch. Following an acquisition by HP, Humane shut down many of the core features of the artificial intelligence-powered wearable and deleted user data, rendering it useless. Yes, some functions remain, like checking battery life (useful!), but you can't access the voice assistant. If you spent $700 on the Ai Pin, you might be wondering what you can do now. These are the risks of being an early adopter, but not getting a refund on a device bricked before the warranty is even up feels like a rip-off. Humane sold roughly 10,000 units, though daily returns were outpacing sales at one point, so there are even fewer Pins in the world. Still, that's thousands of effectively useless devices. It's a blip in the amount of e-waste generated in a year around the world -- already at a crisis point -- but Humane really should have offered a more responsible approach with the Ai Pin's demise. There might not be a way to get your money back, though, if you bought the pin in October of 2024 (for some reason), you might fall under the typical 120-day window to issue a chargeback with your credit card. There are some alternative options, however. Let's explore. Killing a product consumers have spent money on is "unfair and deceptive." That's what Lucas Gutterman told WIRED via email. He's the campaign director of the Designed to Last campaign at Public Interest Research Groups (PIRG). "When we buy something with advertised features, we should get what we pay for, and when we get ripped off the law should protect us," Gutterman says. "I urge everyone who purchased a Humane AI Pin to file a complaint with the FTC so they can step up and protect consumers." Last year, a coalition of groups like US PIRG and Consumer Reports sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission, urging the agency to address "software tethering," described as the use of software to control and limit the function of a device after someone buys it. The FTC subsequently conducted a study that attempted to determine software support commitments for more than 180 products, only to find that "nearly 89 percent of the manufacturer's web pages for these products failed to disclose how long the products would receive software updates." Humane's warranty states that the "software and software functionality" are excluded, which is often the case on many connected products. But the study also noted that it's deceptive if manufacturers market a device's features but then fail to provide software updates to maintain those capabilities -- it may violate the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act, which was enacted in 1975 to protect consumers from unfair disclaimers in warranties. "Without transparent labeling of length of software support, or by taking away key features that were advertised, manufacturers might be violating the FTC Act by deceiving consumers," Gutterman says. "Paying for a $700 product that's supposed to work, and then being told it will suddenly stop working, is a 'harm consumers cannot avoid,' although it's one that Humane could have humanely avoided before they shipped e-waste-to-be."

The Humane Ai Pin Has Already Been Brought Back to Life

Humane bricked its pricey gadget on Friday afternoon. A short time later, a hacker got the codes to unlock it and potentially turn it into the true smartphone replacement it was meant to be. The day the Humane Ai Pin died, it was also reborn. Or at least, there was hope. On February 28, shortly after noon Pacific time, Humane switched off its servers supporting its contentious Ai Pin -- essentially bricking a $700 device that was less than a year old. Minutes later, in a Discord voice chatroom with the label "The death of Ai Pin," one member of a band of dedicated hackers, determined to keep their Pins alive, let the rest of the group in on a secret. He had the codes they needed to get through Humane's encryption. Humane's gadget is the poster child of AI-enhanced hardware disappointments. The cute, clippable device was meant to hang on a lapel or shirt pocket and let you carry out many of the functions you'd find in a phone -- take pictures, display text messages, and order around an AI chatbot, all with some added pizazz in the form of Humane's promised holographic laser displays. Released to the world in April 2024, the Pin was an immediate disappointment. Its main features simply did not work well, and from there things just got worse. The Pin was a resounding flop, widely mocked, and the company even reached the point where it processed more returns of the device than it had sold. In February 2025, less than a year after the Pin was released, Humane announced it would shut down its services at the end of the month -- Friday, February 28 -- and part off some of its key AI components to the computer company HP. Humane offered few concessions to Pin owners. Refunds would only be given if someone had purchased a Pin within the past 90 days. For the remaining fans of the expensive, short-lived device, the move was a gut punch. In the final week of the Humane Ai Pin's short life, soon-to-be-former users ran through all of the stages of grief across Humane's subreddits and Discord servers. There were furious rebukes. Heartbroken goodbyes. Disappointment all around. "We're super bummed," says a Humane Pin user who asked to go by his X handle, @23box_, or just "23" out of fear of being targeted by "a multi-billion dollar company beholden to shareholders." He was an early adopter and evangelist for Humane's device who says he used the Humane Ai Pin regularly, up until the minute it went out of service. "This is a super unique device that we used almost every day for almost a year. We really just wanted this to have a good run." The official Humane Discord was shut down the morning of February 27. Luckily, 23 had already decided to start a separate Discord server for Humane refugees, called reHumane, in an effort to pursue unsanctioned forays into deconstructing the Pin away from the watchful eye of Humane or HP. "We didn't want them to know what we were doing," 23 says. Marcel, another user who gave only his first name to avoid exposing himself to reprisal from HP, saw the end of Humane's brief era as something exciting. He is used to tearing things like this apart. He has constructed his own PlayStation Portal out of a Nintendo Switch. He was one of the first people to transfer the Rabbit R1 source code onto an Android phone (much to the chagrin of a company that insisted its device was not simply an Android app).

The AI invention that was going to revolutionize smartphones forever will stop working this Sunday - Softonic

Humane AI will stop manufacturing its portable device Ai Pin on February 28, 2025, citing limited market acceptance and technical issues since its launch Humane AI has announced the discontinuation of its wearable device, the Ai Pin, which will stop functioning on February 28, 2025, after being acquired by HP. Since its launch, the acceptance of the Ai Pin in the market has been very poor due to various criticisms regarding its difficulty of use and technical issues, including overheating and lack of connection with smartphones. Consumers who own the Ai Pin must sync and download their data before the deadline to avoid data loss, as, after February 28, 2025, the device will lose access to Humane's servers and all stored data will be deleted. "We strongly recommend syncing your Ai Pin via WiFi and downloading any saved images, videos, or notes before February 28, 2025," the company stated in a statement. The Ai Pin, which was described by CNET as a "Star Trek communicator powered by AI," included features such as language translation, object recognition, and responses to AI queries. However, despite its promising concept, the execution failed to meet user expectations. According to CNET's lead writer, Scott Stein, the device was interesting but complicated to handle: "The lack of connection to any phone made it feel absurd," he stated. Through its camera, the Ai Pin had the ability to identify locations and describe objects, although these attempts often resulted in confusion, as happened on one occasion when, while trying to identify a can of drink, the device returned information about a 2022 Apple TV Plus movie. With the halt of its sale and operation, AI enthusiasts will need to reflect on whether the concept of smart wearable devices was another failed attempt in the pursuit of technological innovation.