Meta is developing an AI-powered pendant and plans to begin testing the device within the next year, according to an internal memo viewed by The Information. The pendant would extend the work of Limitless, the AI wearables startup Meta acquired at the end of 2025, whose flagship product clipped to a shirt or hung as a necklace to record the wearer's conversations. The push comes as Meta's Reality Labs division, which houses its hardware bets, posted a $4 billion loss in the first quarter of 2026.
The memo also lays out an expanded AI glasses lineup and a new business-tier subscription called Wearables for Work, according to the report. Together, the three product lines form Meta's broadest wearables slate to date and signal that the company sees on-body AI hardware as the path out of Reality Labs' chronic losses.
Meta framed the Limitless deal at the time of acquisition as a way to "accelerate our work to build AI-enabled wearables." Limitless built a small recording pendant paired with software that transcribed and summarized the user's day, a category that has produced more failed launches than hits.
Key facts
- 01Meta plans to begin testing an AI-powered pendant within the next year, per an internal memo viewed by The Information.
- 02The device builds on Limitless, the AI pendant startup Meta acquired at the end of 2025.
- 03Reality Labs lost $4 billion in Q1 2026, the division Meta is counting on these wearables to turn around.
- 04The same memo outlines an expanded AI glasses lineup and a new business subscription called Wearables for Work.
The pendant category has a short and unflattering history. Earlier ambient AI wearables struggled with privacy backlash, marketing missteps, and a more basic problem: users could not articulate what the devices were for once the novelty wore off. The Humane Ai Pin and Rabbit R1 both drew sharp consumer reviews before sales collapsed.
That track record has not deterred the field. OpenAI is working on its own AI hardware with former Apple design chief Jony Ive, a project the company has confirmed but not detailed. Meta's pendant joins a queue of devices betting that the right combination of multimodal models, always-on listening, and a familiar form factor can finally make ambient AI stick.
The Wearables for Work subscription is the more novel piece of the memo. Selling AI wearables as a B2B tool — for field technicians, healthcare workers, or knowledge workers in meetings — sidesteps the consumer-novelty problem and lands in a market where companies already pay for monitoring and transcription software. It also gives Meta a recurring-revenue line item against hardware that has so far been a pure cost center.
Reality Labs has been Meta's most expensive bet for years. The division's $4 billion Q1 2026 loss continues a pattern of multi-billion-dollar quarterly losses dating back to the company's pivot toward the metaverse in 2021. Mark Zuckerberg has consistently defended the spend as long-term infrastructure for the next computing platform, but the financial pressure to produce a hit hardware product is mounting.
Meta's AI glasses partnership with Ray-Ban is the one hardware effort that has shown commercial traction, and the planned lineup expansion suggests Meta wants to build a family of devices around that beachhead rather than chase a single flagship. A pendant, a wider glasses range, and a paid work tier all share the same underlying model stack and roughly the same on-device sensors.
The risks remain familiar. Always-on recording devices walk straight into privacy regulation in the EU and a patchwork of state laws in the US, and the consumer reaction to the Limitless and Humane launches showed that bystanders, not just buyers, shape whether a product survives its first year. Meta has not commented on the memo, and the timing, pricing, and final form of the pendant could shift before testing begins.
What Meta is really testing is whether ambient AI hardware can find a job-to-be-done that justifies the social cost of wearing a microphone. The glasses category has answered yes, narrowly, by piggybacking on a product people already wear. A pendant has no such cover, which means Meta will either need a compelling enterprise use case via Wearables for Work or a consumer feature sharp enough to overcome a category that has so far produced more cautionary tales than category leaders.
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