Samsung just dropped the Galaxy S26 series at Unpacked 2026 in San Francisco, and it's betting everything on what it calls "agentic AI" - AI that doesn't just respond but anticipates what you need. The flagship S26 Ultra packs a custom chip with a 39% more powerful neural processing unit, a first-of-its-kind Privacy Display that blocks side viewing, and an early preview of Google's Gemini 3 platform. CEO TM Roh framed it as the moment AI stops being a novelty and becomes infrastructure.
Samsung just made its biggest AI bet yet. At Galaxy Unpacked 2026 in San Francisco, the company unveiled the Galaxy S26 series - a lineup that CEO TM Roh says represents the shift from AI as spectacle to AI as essential infrastructure. "Every groundbreaking technology follows a similar journey," Roh told the crowd at the Palace of Fine Arts. "It begins as a marvel - rare, expensive and loudly celebrated. But the technologies that change history fade into the background because they become infrastructure." The Galaxy S26's mission? Close the gap between what AI promises and what people actually experience daily.
At the heart of the announcement is agentic AI - Samsung's term for AI that doesn't wait for commands but actively anticipates needs. The flagship feature is Now Nudge, which understands conversational context and surfaces relevant suggestions without forcing you to switch apps. Planning dinner while texting? Now Nudge might pull up restaurant options right in the conversation. The upgraded Bixby now supports real-time web search with results appearing directly in chat instead of bouncing you to a browser. Call Screening, another Galaxy AI feature, summarizes incoming calls so you can see who's calling and why before picking up.
The tech powering all this is impressive. Samsung co-developed a custom application processor for the Galaxy S26 Ultra featuring a neural processing unit that's 39% more powerful than the previous generation and a CPU that's 19% faster, according to . The phone runs on 's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5, the largest vapor chamber Samsung's ever put in a phone keeps temperatures in check, and optimized power efficiency stretches battery life while faster charging cuts downtime.
