Friend CEO Avi Schiffmann welcomes me into his palace—what he calls his large apartment in San Francisco.
He sits on the couch in his living room, clad in an orange shirt emblazoned with a cartoon version of the motorcycle driven by Italian racer Valentino Rossi. He props his feet up on the side table and leans back, a round, softly glowing circular Friend pendant dangling from a yellow cord around his neck.
This is the second iteration of the Friend necklace, the controversial AI companion device that just about everyone (me included) seems to hate. The company announced the device on Thursday through its new X handle.
The first version of Friend was an always-listening AI wearable that responded via text message. The big update here is a speaker on the back that lets the device voice its responses aloud. That has changed the shape of the pendant, as the underside with the speaker is bulkier than before. Its AI chops have also been upgraded, now running OpenAI’s latest models.
Courtesy of Friend
Like the first go, Friend aims to be a digital companion users can talk to and hold long conversations with. Unlike the original, each new pendant comes with a random voice and personality already established. The user cannot change the voice or name, so you’re locked in with that Friend. (Your mileage may vary on how friendly the thing actually is to you.)
The new pendant costs $249, a marked increase over the original’s $129 price. You can buy one now on Friend.com, a domain Schiffmann paid $1.8 million for. There is also an optional $10 monthly subscription that lets the AI remember the conversations you’ve had for longer than 30 days. The colorful cord around Schiffmann’s neck is part of an accessories collection he says will be coming later this year.
Schiffmann first garnered headlines in 2020 as a 17-year-old who built a website to track Covid-19 cases during the pandemic. Now 24, he’s far more well known—and outright notorious—for leading a company that makes a device many have called dystopian or like something out of a Black Mirror episode.
“I’ve grown up a lot,” Schiffmann tells me just about every time I see him.
Behind Schiffmann’s couch is a gigantic framed photograph of a Paris subway station with ads for the Friend pendant splayed across the walls. The ads, placed by Schiffmann’s company across New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago in 2025—and Paris in early 2026—sparked vigorous pushback and controversy over AI usage. People graffitied them in protest and griped that they devalued humanity, generating a litany of poignant headlines about the ads. The marketing got much more attention than the actual product ever did. (The art frame he’s got the photo in at home cost $500, Schiffmann tells me later.)