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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).
