Thousands of clean white ads for an AI necklace called Friend went up across the New York subway in the fall of 2025, and within days New Yorkers had covered them in anti-AI graffiti. The campaign was enormous, more than a million dollars across some eleven thousand rail-car placements and thousands of platform posters, pitched by its founder as the largest subway campaign the city had ever seen. The device meant to sell companionship had become, almost overnight, the face of everything people had come to distrust about it.
Friend is a small pendant, under two inches, with a microphone that is always listening. It does not speak aloud. Instead it texts you in real time, a companion clipped to your chest that hears your day and comments on it by message. Behind it is Avi Schiffmann, a Harvard dropout in his early twenties who spent 1.8 million dollars just to buy the domain friend.com before spending more than that again to paper the subway with it. The product itself sells for around a hundred dollars.
The market did not break the product. It refused it.
Most failures in the AI companion market are stories of something breaking: a company running out of money, a device losing its servers, a model changing overnight. Friend is a different kind of failure, and a more interesting one. Nothing broke. The premise was rejected. Reviewers were merciless, one describing the experience as being like wearing a senile, anxious grandmother around your neck, another calling it a wearable that bullies you. But the sharper verdict came from people who had not bought it at all and never would. They took one look at the pitch and defaced it.
Two things triggered that reaction, and both are baked into the product rather than its execution. The first is surveillance: a microphone that records not just the wearer but everyone within earshot, continuously, is not a neutral accessory, and a city of strangers understood that instantly. The second is the name itself. A device marketed as a friend, sold as something to fill the space other people occupy, asks the culture to accept a substitution most of it is not willing to make. Mental-health experts warned it could crowd out the real relationships it claimed to supplement. The category’s underlying problem is usually framed as engagement or dependency. Friend surfaced a plainer version of it: sell companionship as a replacement, and you provoke people who would rather defend the thing being replaced.
The graffiti was the review
Schiffmann leaned into the backlash rather than away from it. He posed for photographs in front of the vandalized ads and called capitalism the greatest artistic medium, treating the graffiti as proof he had captured the public’s attention. By late 2025, CNN was describing the little pendant as a symbol of the broader revolt against AI. There is a reading of all this as savvy provocation, and the attention was real. But attention bought by becoming a symbol of what people fear is a strange asset to hold, and it points at a truth the whole category keeps testing: a random human still beats a supportive machine over time, and people know it well enough to fight for it.
That is why the vandalism belongs in any honest account of this market’s failures, even though Friend is still being sold. What responsibility looks like here is not only a question of how a companion behaves once you are using it. It is a question of what you are asking people to give up to use it at all. Schiffmann said the graffiti proved he had bought the zeitgeist. He was right, though not in the way he meant. The city had read the pitch, understood it exactly, and written its answer across every wall.
Sources: CNN Business (November 2025, Friend as a symbol of AI backlash). Fortune, Fast Company (2025, reviews and the subway campaign). Futurism (2025, the vandalized ads and founder response). Wikipedia (Friend product and Avi Schiffmann).
