- Samsung has spoken more about its plans for an ‘AI OS’ that it says will help it stand out from iPhones and other Android phones
- This will apparently be a proactive system that can carry out tasks without being asked
- The company has also said that the fundamental AI features will remain free of charge
The Samsung Galaxy S26 series is, aside from the Ultra’s impressive Privacy Display, a bit of an iterative hardware update. But when it comes to software and particularly AI, Samsung has made greater strides — and it seems like this is just the beginning.
Speaking at the launch, Samsung execs Won-Joon Choi (COO of Mobile eXperience Business) and Benjamin Braun (Chief Marketing Officer at Samsung Europe) have talked a big game about their vision for AI, saying “we want to create a new Android OS” called AI OS.
This AI OS is something the company is working with Google to create, and will apparently be “a big differentiator in our market”, helping Samsung’s phones stand out from both iPhones and other Android rivals.
As Samsung admitted, that hasn’t always been the case. “So, before, it was iOS versus Android. Android was a kind of a follower in a sense because iPhone was launched first back in 2007 and then Android was introduced a couple of years later,” said Won-Joon Choi.
“But in the AI era I think there are a lot of innovations that we can do at the OS level and we are working with Google to create the so-called AI OS. We want to create a new Android OS we call AI OS,” he added.
Bold words, so what exactly will this AI OS be capable of? Well, the discussion was still light on specific details, but Samsung describes the AI at the heart of it as being a “magic, invisible friend” which can proactively do things for you, rather than you having to ask it to.
That’s in contrast to current phone-based AI, which for the most part is reactive — requiring you to tell it to do things. Instead, AI OS will apparently do “the things that you thought would be a good thing, but you didn’t quite have time to do”, all without being prompted.
“So I can see a shift as we go from infancy, as we get into a bit of more maturity, as we go from being reactive to proactive AI,” Benjamin Braun added.
There was a basic example of this during the Unpacked keynote. In a preview of its latest Now Brief summary (below), Samsung showed a restaurant reservation that wasn’t in the phone owner’s calendar. Instead, Galaxy AI had remembered that the restaurant’s confirmation had been sent to the person’s text messages, and flagged it in the Now Brief for that day under a “here’s something to check” section.
Clearly, Samsung’s vision for its new ‘AI OS’ goes way beyond this and does require a fair amount of opt-in from a privacy standpoint. But if it works as well in practice as that small example, then it could be a subtle but powerful shift from traditional smartphone operating systems.
An agentic AI powered by lots of LLMs
Basically, what Samsung is describing here is what’s known as agentic AI, where AI systems can accomplish goals without much human supervision.
This is an idea that lots of companies are exploring, but it sounds like Samsung plans to put it at the heart of Galaxy phones — and the good news is that much of it should remain free, as the company said it plans to “keep the basic, fundamental AI features free of charge”.
You might be you’re worried about the privacy implications of giving an AI access to all of your phone’s data so it can perform tasks, but Samsung is confident it can win you over there, too. It noted that for most of its AI tools you have the option of using on-device AI or sending data to the cloud.
Commenting on this ‘security vs convenience’ conundrum, Won-Joon Choi said: “Our approach is that we would provide both options. So for most of our features we do have an option of using an on-device AI solution or cloud AI solutions”.
Those on-device AI features are seemingly growing, too. Samsung gave the example of the Winter Olympic Games, which it recently sponsored, where there was often no phone signal up in the mountains at Cortina, Italy.
“If you go to Cortina, you will struggle sometimes to find someone who will speak English,” said Benjamin Braun. “But because the Samsung Galaxy AI sits on the device, you can still use it as a translator, which is pretty amazing. You take loads of photos because it’s a competition — the editing of those photos, where in the past you needed to use Photoshop, it took hours and was very complex, you can just do that now because once again, it sits natively on the device,” he added.
While those features aren’t exactly exclusive to Samsung, the company claimed it has additional advantage over some its rivals. Unlike Google’s Pixel phones, which are very reliant on Gemini from an AI perspective, Samsung’s phones also have the company’s in-house AI features such as Bixby, and tools from other companies too, like Perplexity, sitting alongside Google’s AI features.
So Samsung’s AI OS — which we’re seeing the first steps towards with the Galaxy S26 series — could include some of the best features and models from across the AI ecosystem, making it something that, in theory, could be hard to beat by Apple or anyone else. Whether that’s actually the case is something we’re going to find out as the loading bar progresses on the year 2026.
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