Apple Vision Pro and Smart Glasses Chief Paul Meade Departs for OpenAI

Apple has lost its vice president overseeing the Vision Pro headset and smart glasses projects to OpenAI.

Paul Meade leaves Apple for OpenAI's hardware division. Paul Meade, a vice president, is set to leave Apple by next week and will then start at OpenAI’s hardware unit, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Meade will work on OpenAI’s upcoming family of AI-powered devices, said the people, who declined to be named discussing unannounced personnel moves. The departure occurs on June 26, 2026.

The move continues high-profile defections from Apple to AI rivals. Apple Inc.’s top executive in charge of the Vision Pro headset and the company’s smart glasses efforts is leaving for OpenAI, continuing a streak of high-profile defections to rivals in the artificial intelligence and hardware sectors. Meade had risen through Apple’s hardware engineering ranks, previously serving as head of hardware engineering for the Vision Products Group before taking on broader leadership of its spatial computing hardware after a 2025 reorganization.

Apple restructured its Vision Pro team in March 2025. In March 2025, Apple split leadership of the Vision Products Group. Mike Rockwell, who created the Vision Pro, moved to oversee Siri, while Meade assumed responsibility for the hardware team, which reports into the broader hardware engineering organization under John Ternus. That shift integrated the Vision Pro and smart glasses work more closely with the rest of Apple’s hardware efforts rather than as a standalone group.

Meade’s tenure at Apple spanned multiple AR and VR initiatives. Meade first gained prominence in 2019 when Apple promoted him to vice president of hardware engineering with responsibility for augmented reality projects. Over the following years he played a central role in the engineering of the Vision Pro, which launched in 2024, and subsequent work toward lighter-weight smart glasses targeted for later in the decade. His exit removes a key figure who bridged the original research efforts to product development and integration with the company’s silicon and display teams.

OpenAI expands its hardware ambitions with the hire. OpenAI has been building a hardware division focused on consumer devices that incorporate its AI models. Meade’s arrival adds senior Apple-derived expertise in compact, high-performance hardware design and system integration to that effort. The company has not publicly detailed the timeline or specifications for its family of AI-powered devices.

The loss of Meade marks the latest in a series of departures of senior technical talent from Apple in areas overlapping with artificial intelligence and new computing platforms. Apple has not commented on the move.