- Samsung has talked more about its plans for an “AI OS” that it says will help it stand out from iPhones and other Android phones.
- It will apparently be a proactive system capable of carrying out tasks without being asked.
- The company also said that core AI features will remain free.
The Samsung Galaxy S26 series is, aside from the Ultra’s impressive privacy screen, an iterative hardware update. But when it comes to software and especially AI, Samsung has made greater strides – and it seems like this is just the beginning.
Speaking at the launch, Samsung executives Won-Joon Choi (COO of Mobile eXperience Business) and Benjamin Braun (marketing director at Samsung Europe) spoke big about their vision for AI, stating “we want to create a new Android operating system” called AI OS.
This AI operating system 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 iPhones and other Android competitors.
As Samsung admitted, this wasn’t always the case. “So before it was iOS versus Android. Android was kind of a follower in a sense because the iPhone was first released in 2007 and then Android was introduced a few years later,” Won-Joon Choi said.
“But in the age of AI, I think there is a lot of innovation we can do at the operating system level and we are working with Google to create something called AI OS. We want to create a new Android operating system which we will call AI OS,” he added.
Bold words, so what exactly will this AI operating system 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 “magical, invisible friend” that can proactively do things for you, rather than having to ask it.
This contrasts with current phone-based AI, which is mostly reactive – requiring you to tell it to do things. Instead, AI OS will apparently do “the things you thought were a good thing, but didn’t really have time to do”, all without prompting.
“So I can see a change as we move from childhood, as we get a little more mature, as we move from reactive AI to proactive AI,” added Benjamin Braun.
There was a basic example of this during the Unpacked keynote. In a preview of its latest Now Brief (below), Samsung showed a restaurant reservation that wasn’t on 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 that day’s Now Brief in a “here’s something to check” section.
Clearly, Samsung’s vision for its new “AI OS” goes well beyond that and requires a certain amount of buy-in from a privacy perspective. But if it works as well in practice as this small example does, then it could be a subtle but powerful change from traditional smartphone operating systems.
Agentic AI powered by numerous LLMs
Basically, what Samsung is describing here is what’s called agentic AI, where AI systems can achieve goals without much human supervision.
It’s an idea that many companies are exploring, but it looks like Samsung is planning to put it at the heart of Galaxy phones – and the good news is that much of it is expected to remain free, as the company said it plans to “keep basic and fundamental AI features free.”
You may be worried about the privacy implications of giving an AI access to all the data on your phone so it can perform tasks, but Samsung is confident it can convince you too. He noted that for most of its AI tools, you have the option to use AI on the device or send data to the cloud.
Commenting on this “security versus convenience” conundrum, Won-Joon Choi said, “Our approach is that we would offer both options. So for most of our features, we have the option to use an on-device AI solution or cloud AI solutions.”
These on-device AI features also appear to be growing. Samsung gave the example of the Winter Olympics, which it recently sponsored, where there was often no phone signal in the mountains of Cortina, Italy.
“If you go to Cortina, sometimes you will have difficulty finding someone who speaks English,” explained Benjamin Braun. “But because you have Samsung Galaxy AI installed on the device, you can still use it as a translator, which is pretty amazing. You take a lot of photos because it’s a competition – editing those photos, whereas before you had to use Photoshop, it took hours and was very complex, you can do it now because again, it’s installed natively on the device,” he added.
While these features aren’t exactly exclusive to Samsung, the company claims to have an added advantage over some of its competitors. 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 features, such as Bixby, as well as tools from other companies, like Perplexity, alongside Google’s own AI features.
So Samsung’s AI operating system – which we’re seeing the first steps towards in the Galaxy S26 series – could include some of the best features and designs in the AI ecosystem, making it something that, in theory, could be hard for Apple or anyone else to beat. We will find out if this is actually the case as the loading bar progresses into 2026.
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