OpenAI has acquired a company specializing in manufacturing mobile phone cameras and enhancing their efficiency with artificial intelligence to match that of professionals, confirming its continued efforts to launch its AI-powered smartphone.
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Although Glass Imaging is a relatively new company, its founders were former Apple engineers who worked on developing the company’s distinctive “Portrait” photography mode, before leaving in 2019 to establish their own company.
Glass Imaging aims to enhance the quality of cameras in mobile phones using artificial intelligence so that they can match professional cameras in both image resolution and optical zoom level.
The new acquisition represents another step taken by OpenAI to compete with the owner of the iPhone, after it hired Jony Ive, the designer of the first generations of the phone, and acquired his company in 2025. It then worked to recruit a number of former Apple engineers and persuaded them to leave the company to join it.
These steps come as part of Sam Altman’s efforts to develop an artificial intelligence phone capable of competing with the iPhone, especially after many Apple experts moved to work at his company, which led to a wide-ranging legal battle between the two companies.
But why did OpenAI decide to acquire Glass Imaging specifically? And what does the company offer besides the fact that its founders previously worked at Apple?
Technology that enhances optical zoom
The Wall Street Journal reported that the deal increases Glass Imaging's valuation to $300 million, compared to an investment round the company concluded last year with a valuation of $100 million.
The company recently developed a technology that enhances the optical zoom of mobile phone lenses using artificial intelligence, which appeared in the "Honor 600" phones launched by the Chinese company "Honor" this year, according to a separate report from the American website "Beta Pixel".
The praised the technology developed by Glass Imaging, describing its results as a remarkable improvement in the quality of close-up images using mobile phones, as well as an increase in image detail that overcomes the physical obstacles of optical zoom in mobile phone cameras.
The company's technology relies directly on the use of neural processing cores and artificial intelligence to remove color interference, noise, and blurriness found in optical zoom images using mobile phones, and then relies on merging multiple frames to make the image clearer.
The report explained that the "Glass Imaging" technology does not rely on generating new details out of thin air, but rather on restoring the real details that were lost during the optical zoom process through actual data captured by the lens's image sensor.
This helps it avoid the criticisms that photography enthusiasts direct at image enhancement mechanisms using computing, since previous techniques relied on generating details that complemented the image.
OpenAI phone next year
In a related context, a report by the American tech website "9to5Mac" revealed that "OpenAI" is seeking to launch its phone in the first half of next year and plans to compete directly with the "iPhone".
The new phone comes with a processor made by the Chinese company MediaTek, and it will be a modified version of its Dimensity 9600 processor, which is based on N2P technology developed by the Taiwanese chip company TSMC.
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