First large-scale deployment of an AI-native operating system goes on sale April 24 through SoftBank’s nationwide retail network, with global expansion to follow later this year
SAN MATEO, Calif., April 17, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Brain Technologies, Inc., a U.S.-based artificial intelligence and interface company, today announced the commercial launch of the Natural AI Phone in Japan — marking the first large-scale deployment of Natural OS, its AI-native operating system that replaces traditional app-grid navigation with intention-based interaction.
The device goes on sale April 24 through SoftBank Corp., with distribution across more than 5,000 retail locations nationwide and pre-orders opening today. The launch represents a major commercial milestone and the first chapter in a broader product roadmap, as Brain brings a fundamentally new kind of smartphone experience to a live consumer market.
Rather than layering AI features onto a conventional phone, Natural OS reimagines the smartphone from the ground up. The system is designed to understand what a user wants to accomplish and help complete it — without requiring users to navigate between apps, manage notifications, or manually coordinate across services. Brain calls this approach “intention-based interaction,” and it represents a decade of work by the company toward a new computing paradigm.
Why It Matters
Brain filed the provisional patents on the architecture of autonomous AI agents in 2016 — seven years before ChatGPT made the category a household idea, and before the Transformer paper that set the modern AI era in motion. The non-provisional filings followed in December 2017: four patents filed the same day, covering automatic multi-step execution (what the industry now calls tool use), operation-graph generation (the planning substrate underneath), operation mimicry at the OS level (what is now called computer use), and complex task cognitive planning (what is now called agent orchestration). The USPTO granted them between 2020 and 2024. U.S. Patents 10,838,779 and 11,210,593 are the foundational pair — the execution engine and the planning graph that sit underneath what the industry now calls agentic AI.
What the industry pivoted toward in 2023 is what Brain has been building for a decade. The Japan launch is the first time that architectural work reaches consumers at scale. Natural OS is not AI features added to a phone. It is a phone rebuilt around the thesis that the app grid — the organizing metaphor of mobile computing for the last eighteen years — is the wrong abstraction for an era in which software can understand intent directly. SoftBank’s deployment puts that thesis in front of more than 41 million subscribers, through more than 5,000 retail locations, starting April 24.
How Natural OS Works
Natural OS is not an assistant layered on top of an operating system. It is the operating system. The app grid has been replaced by an intelligence that learns the user’s patterns, understands what they are trying to accomplish, and acts across services on their behalf.
The architecture is built on three principles:
It flows. Tasks unfold around intent, not around apps. The user asks; the system does.
It organizes. Information groups itself around goals and concepts, not into static folders. The phone adapts to what matters; the user stops adapting to the phone.
It persists. The system works in the background between interactions — watching for what comes next, not waiting to be told. Intelligence that persists is qualitatively different from intelligence that responds.
The Japan version introduces these principles in their first commercial form. Natural OS is designed to deepen substantially with each release. The full architectural surface — including capabilities designed for users who work across complex information, multiple contexts, and extended projects — is reserved for the global launch later this year.
SoftBank Partnership and Distribution
SoftBank serves as the exclusive telecommunications partner for the Japan launch, offering the device across its nationwide retail network as part of its broader strategy to lead in early AI adoption. The partnership places Natural AI Phone at the heart of one of Japan’s largest consumer technology networks — more than 5,000 retail locations serving over 41 million mobile subscribers nationwide.
The Japan version of the device is designed specifically for local services and is not intended to represent the full experience planned for other markets. As Brain expands globally, the platform will continue to evolve with region-specific capabilities.
What’s Next: Global Expansion
The complete Natural OS platform arrives globally later this year. Additional updates and market expansions are planned as the platform continues to evolve.
“We didn’t set out to build a better smartphone,” said Jerry Yue, Founder and CEO of Brain Technologies. “We asked what a phone would look like if you designed it around the way human attention actually works. The answer was something entirely new. Japan gets it first. The world sees it whole later this year.”
About Brain Technologies
For fifty years, computers have organized the world around themselves. Files, folders, apps, screens — we learned their language, adopted their logic, and reshaped human behavior to fit the constraints of silicon. Brain Technologies was founded on a single conviction: that era is over.
Founded in 2015 by Jerry Yue, Brain has spent a decade building toward a fundamental reinvention of computing — one where technology finally learns to think the way humans do. Not in apps. Not in menus. In intent, context, and meaning.
The result is Natural OS — the world’s first AI-native, agent-native operating system. Rather than layering AI onto the smartphone, Natural OS tears down the walls between apps entirely, rebuilding the computing experience from first principles: a living spatial intelligence that organizes around human thought, anticipates needs before they’re spoken, and transforms the phone from a tool into a thinking partner.
Brain’s fingerprints are on the foundations of modern AI. The company was first to deploy one-shot learning in NLP in a consumer product — pioneering the pretrained model paradigm that would later define GPT and the large language model era. In 2020, three years before ChatGPT, Brain launched generative interfaces serving millions of users — reimagining how humans interact with AI. And its foundational patents in autonomous AI agents and multi-step execution — filed nearly a decade ago, long before agentic AI became an industry — established the intellectual bedrock of today’s agentic AI systems. Its investors include Laurene Powell Jobs and Scott Cook.
Natural OS launched in Japan with SoftBank in April 2026 — the beginning of a global transformation in how humanity relates to technology. Brain is headquartered in San Mateo, California.
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