Rabbit's new agent reaches your local files from Telegram and iMessage

You text the agent from your phone and it opens a file on the laptop in your bag. Wired reports that OS3 lives in the cloud and connects to desktop software, files and web pages through a local agent node ^[1].

Jesse Lyu told Wired the company delivered more than 100,000 R1s, that return rates ran under 5 percent, and that the hardware earned roughly a 45 to 50 percent margin ^[8]. Under 5 percent of 100,000 units is fewer than 5,000 sent back ^[1]. Wired reports no retention or usage figures. When Lyu wanted to show demand was still there, he raised his phone to the webcam with four or five orders that had come in that morning through Rabbit's website, and noted that it left out sales from Amazon, Target and Best Buy ^[22].

Rabbit's Discord has more than 12,000 members who tell the company what to build ^[19], about one for every eight R1s delivered ^[2]. That is a count of sign-ups. What those members asked for is the useful part: they wanted the device opened up, and an R1 can now run OpenClaw or Hermes agents in place of Rabbit's proprietary models ^[20].

"Today, if you look at our R1 device, it's completely different from day one," Lyu said. "We're more open; the device is yours, you decide what to do with the device." ^[21] Rabbit has deployed around 50 updates in the past year and a half ^[18], roughly one every eleven days ^[3].

Then there is the question of who can switch the channel off. Amazon has already done it to a rival: Meta's Muse agent was banned from crawling Amazon to shop on a user's behalf through a virtual machine ^[23]. Lyu said "We've been through all of this a year and a half ago," recalling the R1's own contested use of a virtual machine to act inside apps ^[24].

Lyu's position is that the engineering worked ^[13]. "I think the challenge is really being extremely limited in resources, team-wise and money-wise, compared to other AI studios that raised billions of dollars," he said ^[12]. Rabbit has raised around $60 million and employs 15 people ^[14]. A planned India launch was blocked by regulation, money got tight, and a handful of employees went on strike saying they were not being paid; Lyu said the company has since secured more funding and that "There are no issues with the company's health." ^[16][17]

For anyone deciding what goes on a managed laptop, what matters is the channel the agent arrives on and whether the agent reads local files. A browser session against a cloud-only assistant is an ordinary software review. A consumer messaging thread plus a local node with file access is the case that needs a written answer before anyone clicks install, covering what the node can read and who can switch the channel off. OS3 sits in the second case, and the R1's AI features shipped without a subscription ^[11].