AT&T Bets on Hark to Fix What Killed Humane's AI Pin

Brett Adcock's secretive AI hardware venture just picked up a heavyweight infrastructure partner. Hark announced that AT&T is investing in the company and signing a strategic partnership covering device certification and network connectivity for a new line of AI-native consumer devices.

The pitch is simple: Hark wants to ship gadgets that talk to the cloud without leaning on your phone's hotspot or your home Wi-Fi. To do that, every device needs its own reliable cellular link, and AT&T is providing both the pipes and the regulatory scaffolding to get hardware onto its network at scale.

The deal in plain terms

The financial terms weren't disclosed, but the structure is clear from the announcement. AT&T is taking an equity position in Hark while committing to work on connecting the startup's devices across its cellular footprint. In Hark's post, founder Brett Adcock framed the collaboration as essential to reaching mainstream consumers, while AT&T COO Jeff McElfresh signaled that the carrier sees Hark's product direction as aligned with where consumer hardware is heading.

The key technical claim from Hark is worth pulling out:

• Devices will operate completely untethered from a smartphone or Wi-Fi network
• Each unit connects directly to AI backends over AT&T's cellular network
• AT&T will handle device certification, the regulatory process carriers use to approve new hardware for their networks
• The partnership covers what Hark calls advanced network capabilities, likely a reference to 5G slicing or low-latency edge features needed for real-time voice and vision

Why a telco, and why now

Hark is not a normal startup. In May, the company raised a $700 million Series A at a $6 billion post-money valuation, in a round led by Parkway Venture Capital and including Nvidia, AMD Ventures, ARK Invest, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures. That cap table already locked in chip supply from three of the four major silicon vendors. What was missing was distribution and connectivity, and that is the gap AT&T fills.

The timing also lines up with Hark's product roadmap. The company signed a deal to bring a large cluster of thousands of NVIDIA B200 GPUs online to support multimodal pre-training and post-training, working closely with NVIDIA to accelerate development of its first generation of AI systems. Getting a carrier lined up before hardware ships means Hark can bake SIM provisioning and certification into the product from day one rather than retrofitting it.

The real story: learning from Humane's failure

Every AI hardware startup right now is haunted by the same ghost. The category Hark is entering is small, expensive, and littered with failures. Humane's AI Pin became the most public cautionary tale of 2024, with the Rabbit R1 close behind. Even Apple has spent the past year trying to figure out what its on-device AI offering should actually look like.

Humane's pin famously launched with a T-Mobile-only cellular plan that added monthly cost and friction, and reviewers savaged the connectivity experience. Locking in a top-two US carrier early, with equity alignment, is Hark's way of saying it won't repeat that mistake. It also hints that whatever Hark ships will be a standalone device rather than a phone accessory.

What Hark is actually building

Hark has stayed unusually quiet about form factor. What is public: the company plans to design multimodal end-to-end models, its hardware, and its interfaces in tandem, with a system that has persistent memory of your life and can listen, see, and interact with the world in real time. Adcock has described current AI models as feeling basic, saying they should handle natural speech, vision, and long-term personalization out of the box.

The team behind it skews heavily consumer-hardware. Hark has more than 45 researchers, engineers, and designers from leading AI and technology companies, with AI researchers experienced in large-scale model training, tokenization, speech systems, and multimodal data infrastructure, plus hardware engineers recruited from Apple, Tesla and Meta. Design is led by Abidur Chowdhury, a former Apple product executive.

Second-order effects

A few things get more interesting downstream of this partnership:

1. Carrier bundling is back in play for AI devices. Expect Verizon and T-Mobile to look for their own equity-linked AI hardware bets rather than watching AT&T lock up the category.
2. eSIM-first AI wearables become more plausible. If Hark ships with cellular baked in from launch, it validates a distribution model that Humane botched and that Apple has only partially embraced with the Watch.
3. The Adcock flywheel keeps spinning. Adcock founded Figure in 2022, which announced funding at a $39 billion valuation in 2025, and Hark's models are already being trained on Figure's robots, although a person familiar with the plans says there is no intention to combine them. The data and compute overlap between the two companies is a moat competitors can't easily replicate.

The obvious caveat is that no product exists yet. Hark has not disclosed a form factor, price, or launch date, and the AT&T deal is a commercial agreement rather than a shipping product. But the pieces Hark has assembled, foundation models trained on B200 clusters, silicon relationships with Nvidia, AMD, Intel and Qualcomm, and now a national carrier as an investor and certification partner, is the most complete pre-launch stack any AI hardware startup has put together to date.