If you take the subway in New York City, or drive a car in Los Angeles, you\u2019ve seen the ads for Friend.com.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ll binge the entire series with you.\u201d
\u201cI\u2019ll never leave dirty dishes in the sink.\u201d
\u201cI\u2019ll never bail on dinner plans.\u201d<\/p>\n
The slogans are simple, intimate, needy, and impossible to avoid. Friend.com is the biggest campaign in the New York City subway this year, according to Outfront, an MTA billboard marketing agency.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The AI wearable has 11,000 \u201calways on\u201d advertisements in the MTA, some covering a whole train station. Avi Schiffmann, the 22-year-old creator of Friend, told Fortune that the ad campaign cost him $1 million\u2014an enormous outlay for a startup with barely $7 million in venture capital.<\/p>\n
The product itself is simple: a microphone, a Bluetooth chip, and an always-listening mode that pings Google\u2019s Gemini AI to generate responses and store \u201cmemories\u201d in a visual graph.\u00a0The pendant is manufactured in Toronto and marketed as \u201cyour closest confidant.\u201d About 3,000 units have been sold, with 1,000 shipped so far, generating roughly $348,000 in revenue\u2014much of which, Schiffmann said, was spent on manufacturing and marketing. \u201cI don\u2019t have that much money left,\u201d he admitted.<\/p>\n
But Schiffmann doesn\u2019t care about the skeptics, or even about profitability. \u201cProfitability is ideal,\u201d he says, \u201cbut right now it costs me an unfathomable amount of money if you actually use the product.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Schiffmann said he sees Friend as \u201can expression of my early twenties\u201d\u2014down to the materials. He obsessed over the fidget-friendly circular shape, pushed his industrial designers to copy the paper stock of one of his favorite CDs for the user manual, and insisted the packaging be printed only in English and French\u2014because he\u2019s French.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can ask about any aspect of it, and I can tell you a specific detail,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s just what I like and what I don\u2019t like \u2026 an amalgamation of my tastes at this point in time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Victoria Mottesheard, a vice president of marketing at Outfront, the billboard marketing agency Schiffmann worked with for the advertisements, told Fortune the campaign was \u201ctaking over\u201d the Gotham underworld, as well as over 500 bus shelters in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n
\u201cEveryone\u2019s talking about it,\u201d Mottesheard said.<\/p>\n
And they are\u2014but not necessarily in a positive light. Within days, the posters became a magnet for graffiti. Some doodles were harmless, but plenty look like protest art: \u201cAI doesn\u2019t care if you live or die.\u201d \u201cSurveillance capitalism.\u201d \u201cAI will promote suicide if prompted.\u201d Posts about the ads, and the graffiti, are everywhere<\/a> on social media.<\/p>\n Most founders would cringe at that kind of backlash, but Schiffmann called it \u201cartistically validating.\u201d The white space in the ads was intentional, he claimed\u2014the vandalism was part of the plan.\u00a0\u201cThe audience completes the work,\u201d he said, beaming. \u201cCapitalism is the greatest artistic medium.\u201d<\/p>\n To Schiffmann, the vandalized billboards aren\u2019t defacement: They\u2019re proof that his subway takeover is working exactly as intended. The goal, he says, isn\u2019t just to sell a $129 AI pendant. It\u2019s to provoke a cultural debate about what counts as friendship in the age of artificial intelligence. <\/p>\n The fine print<\/strong><\/p>\n First, though, comes the fine print. The AI version of a friend comes with more than just packaging and a charger\u2014it has paperwork. Friend\u2019s terms require waiving the right to jury trials, class actions, and court proceedings, funneling disputes into arbitration in San Francisco. Buried within are clauses on \u201cbiometric data consent,\u201d which grant the company permission to passively record audio and video, collect facial and voice data, and use these to train AI.<\/p>\n Schiffmann\u2019s answer to the legal fine print is that Friend is a weird, first-of-its-kind product, so the terms of service are intentionally heavy. He added that the terms are \u201ca bit extreme\u201d by design\u2014\u201cso I don\u2019t have to keep editing it\u201d\u2014and that with a three-person team and pricey lawyers he\u2019s avoiding extra legal exposure. (He said he\u2019s not selling in Europe to duck the regulatory headache.)<\/p>\n He expects a fight eventually: \u201cI think one day we\u2019ll probably be sued, and we\u2019ll figure it out. It\u2019ll be really cool to see.\u201d<\/p>\n He frames the \u201calways listening\u201d bits as speaker attribution, not surveillance. <\/p>\n \u201cTechnically, it\u2019s not recording stuff\u2014it\u2019s really for an AI, not for a human,\u201d he said. The pendant has a mic and, he claims, only listens when you feel the haptics; if the phone disconnects, \u201cit\u2019s not recording,\u201d and they aren\u2019t caching audio for later upload. He also said they\u2019re not training models on user data right now: \u201cGoogle\u2019s not doing that for the API, and we\u2019re not doing that \u2026 We\u2019re saying it [in the terms of service] so we\u2019re covered, but we\u2019re not doing it yet.\u201d<\/p>\n On storage and access, he leans hard on the device as the gate. He described Friend as \u201ca living YubiKey,\u201d with the encryption key baked into the pendant itself; without it, \u201cyour data is completely inaccessible.\u201d<\/p>\n Hence his blunt line: \u201cIf I smash your Friend with a hammer, your data is gone forever.\u201d (He even told me a journalist\u2019s husband actually smashed her pendant\u2014which, by his design, nuked the memories.) <\/p>\n That swagger is part of the appeal for investors. Friend has raised money from Pace Capital, Caffeinated Capital, and Solana founders Anatoly Yakovenko and Raj Gokal, among others. The business model is still in flux\u2014Schiffmann has floated accessories, AppleCare-style insurance, maybe subscriptions\u2014but for now it\u2019s all about attention.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI purchased the zeitgeist,\u201d he said of the subway buy. He compares his subway tunnel campaign to an \u201cinternational destination\u201d for AI culture, insisting the graffiti proves he\u2019s succeeded.<\/p>\n Critics see something different. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, director of the Center for Technological Responsibility, Reimagination, and Redesign at Brown University, said that Friend is clearly an example of a frothy AI company, but that it also bore a \u201cpernicious\u201d resemblance to a mostly forgotten early-20th-century fad: \u201cradium necklaces.\u201d<\/p>\n When Marie Curie\u2019s new glowing discovery first hit the market, jewelers embedded radium in pendants and bracelets and sold them as chic wellness accessories\u2014until decades later, people started dying of cancer.<\/p>\n \u201cI look at Friend and I think, \u2018Are we making the same mistake?\u2019\u201d Venkatasubramanian told Fortune. \u201cWe\u2019re rushing these intimacy machines into people\u2019s lives with no evidence they\u2019re safe, or even helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n The critique echoes larger skepticism in Silicon Valley, where hardware plays like Humane\u2019s AI Pin and Rabbit\u2019s R1 have already flopped.\u00a0<\/p>\n Avi Schiffmann, wunderkind<\/strong><\/p>\n \u200b\u200bSchiffmann, since he was a teenager, has always had a knack for drawing spectacle. At just 17, he made the COVID-19 tracking website that tens of millions used each day, winning a Webby Award handed to him by Anthony Fauci. He dropped out of Harvard after one semester to build a refugee-housing site in response to the Ukraine war, claiming to connect 100,000 Ukrainians with homes. He\u2019s spun up similar projects for earthquake victims in Turkey and for Black Lives Matter protests. Those quick, high-profile moves have given him a kind of bulletproof confidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n