Summary: A leaked internal memo reported on May 30 says Meta is developing an AI pendant that should enter testing within a year. The roadmap also includes more Meta AI glasses and a Wearables for Work enterprise subscription. The article connects the pendant to Meta’s 2025 Limitless acquisition and frames subscriptions as a response to Reality Labs’ $4 billion Q1 2026 loss.
An internal Meta memo has made its way to The Information, and TechCrunch ran the story on May 30: work is under way on an AI-powered pendant, meant to enter a test phase within a year. Neither the feature set nor the price is spelled out yet, but the trajectory reads plainly — Meta means to carry AI beyond the handset and onto the person wearing it.
The first quarter of 2026 alone saw Reality Labs bleed $4 billion, and the wearables line carries the assignment of closing that gap. Nor is the memo about one device — it details the hardware roadmap in full plus a scheme for making money from it.
What the Memo Lays Out
As The Information tells it, the memo maps out three lines of work:
- The AI pendant itself, due to start testing inside a year
- More models joining Meta’s AI glasses line
- An enterprise subscription under the name Wearables for Work
Taken together, the three lines put AI hardware into private and professional settings at once: the glasses and the pendant take on wearable sensing plus assistant duties, and the enterprise subscription exists to make the devices pay their own way, not a repeat subsidy-funded scramble for market share.
Equally plain is what the reporting leaves out: nothing yet on what the device will actually do, what it might sell for, or the models that would run it; TechCrunch sought comment from Meta. At this stage the single concrete fact is the calendar: a twelve-month countdown to testing.
The Limitless Deal as the Starting Point
Odds are this pendant will not be built from a blank page. Late in 2025, Meta bought Limitless — a startup making AI devices whose own product already took precisely this physical shape, pinning onto clothes or riding on a necklace while it captures whatever conversations the wearer has. At the time, Meta said the purchase would help “accelerate our work to build AI-enabled wearables.”
TechCrunch works from the read that the pendant now in the pipeline grows out of that groundwork — a sound read. Re-tackling a wearable’s hard engineering all over again makes little sense when the acquisition delivered a team whose own product had already made it to market. The team brought the awkward part too: the Limitless pendant existed to record its wearer’s every conversation, and that very capability is why the category draws such contention.
A $4 Billion Hole and the Subscription Answer
If any line of the memo warrants a close read, it is the enterprise subscription — Reality Labs closed Q1 2026 down $4 billion, and Meta needs revenue layered from two sources, the devices themselves with subscriptions stacked on top, rather than counting on margins from hardware sales. The step follows what Meta has been doing on the software side: all three of Meta’s main apps have just picked up paid subscriptions, and Meta One AI plans are now in testing. Wearables for Work applies that same subscribe-first thinking to hardware, so that AI is no longer just an expense line and starts yielding revenue that recurs.
Selling into workplaces also steps around consumer wearables’ hardest question: getting an individual to buy a device they cannot easily put a price on. Hands-free documentation, meeting capture, field-service assistance — an employer asking for any of these can sign off on per-seat pricing with far less agonizing than a lone shopper eyeballing a gadget.
Lessons From Failed AI Wearables
The record for AI pendants so far is dismal. The TechCrunch piece runs through three tales of caution: Friend put over $1 million into advertising its AI necklace on the subways; the buzz still faded quickly. Humane’s AI Pin simply died, with HP paying $116 million for its assets; and the OpenAI device effort with Jony Ive is still hunting for its formula. Each failure traces back to much the same causes — privacy worries, marketing that missed the mark, and the deepest one: the devices did very little.
Privacy, though, is baked into the category itself. When a wearable captures the talk around it, bystanders are pulled into the recording — everyone close enough to hear, not only the customer who paid for it — and on that front Meta’s brand totes heavier baggage than any startup’s ever did.
Meta’s edge: the turnaround does not rest on one device. The glasses already have a user base to build on, the Limitless people who arrived via the acquisition have put hardware on the market before, and on the business side the enterprise subscription gives Meta a way to make money that none of those failures ever had. Even so, dodging that fate means settling the category’s oldest question: just what does a device worn all day, listening the whole time, add to an ordinary day? The timetable sits in the memo; the verdict waits for the tests to begin.