- Samsung has spoken more about its plans for an ‘AI OS’, which it says will help it stand out from iPhones and other Android phones
- This will apparently be a proactive system that can perform tasks without being asked
- The company has also said that the basic AI features will remain free
The Samsung Galaxy S26 series, apart from the Ultra’s impressive Privacy Display, is a bit of an iterative hardware update. But when it comes to software and AI in particular, Samsung has made major strides — and it looks like this is just the beginning.
Samsung speaking at the launch and led by 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 it 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 kind of the successor in a way because the iPhone was first launched back in 2007 and then Android was introduced a few 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, which 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 specifics, but Samsung describes the AI at the heart of it as being a “magical, invisible friend” that can proactively do things for you, instead of you having to ask it to.
That’s unlike current phone-based AI, which is mostly reactive — requiring you to tell it to do things. Instead, the AI OS will apparently do “those things you thought would be a good thing but didn’t quite have time to do,” all without being asked.
“So I can see a shift as we go from childhood, as we get a little more mature, 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 on the phone owner’s calendar. Instead, the 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 out” section.
Clearly, Samsung’s vision for its new ‘AI OS’ goes far beyond this and requires quite a bit of opt-in from a privacy point of view. But if it works as well in practice as the small example, then it could be a subtle but powerful shift from traditional smartphone operating systems.
An agent AI powered by lots of LLMs
Basically, what Samsung is describing here is what is known as agent AI, where AI systems can achieve goals without much human supervision.
This is an idea that many 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, basic AI features free”.
You might be concerned 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 to use the AI on the device or send data to the cloud.
Commenting on this ‘security vs convenience’ conundrum, Won-Joon Choi said: “Our approach is that we would offer both options. So for most of our features, we have an option to use an on-device AI solution or cloud AI solutions”.
These AI capabilities on the device are also apparently growing. Samsung gave the example of the Winter Olympics, which it recently sponsored, where there was often no phone signal up in the mountains of Cortina, Italy.
“If you go to Cortina, sometimes you will struggle to find someone who will speak English,” said Benjamin Braun. “But because the Samsung Galaxy AI is on the device, you can still use it as a translator, which is pretty amazing. You take lots of pictures because it’s a competition – the editing of the pictures where you used to have to use Photoshop, it took hours and was very complex, you can just do it now because it’s built into the device again,” he added.
While these features aren’t exactly exclusive to Samsung, the company claimed it has additional advantages over some of its rivals. Unlike Google’s Pixel phones, which rely heavily on Gemini from an AI perspective, Samsung’s phones also have the company’s in-house AI capabilities, such as Bixby, and third-party tools, such as Perplexity, that sit alongside Google’s AI capabilities.
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 the entire AI ecosystem, making it something that could, in theory, be hard to beat Apple or anyone else. Whether that’s actually the case is something we’ll have to find out as the loading line progresses in the year 2026.
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