Sonos Is Opening Its Speakers to Whatever AI You Choose

By Brian K. Neal

For years, the logic of the smart home was relatively simple: the company that made the device also wanted to control how you interacted with it. Hardware came with an app, an ecosystem and, increasingly, an assistant. Sonos is beginning to separate those things.

With the September 8 rollout of Sonos 27, the company opened Early Access to Sonos 27mcp, a new system that allows outside artificial intelligence—including ChatGPT and Claude—to control Sonos. A listener can remain inside an AI conversation and ask it to interact with their speakers rather than moving into the Sonos app to perform every command. Sonos describes the capability plainly: 27mcp lets users connect Sonos to “any outside AI, including ChatGPT and Claude.”

The immediate feature is easy to understand. Someone can ask an AI assistant to change what is playing, control where sound is playing or adjust the system, and that assistant can communicate the request to Sonos. But the more important decision is who Sonos is allowing to sit between the listener and its hardware.

It does not necessarily have to be Sonos.

That makes 27mcp different from simply installing another assistant inside a speaker. Sonos is allowing intelligence developed somewhere else to become an interface for products it built. Anthropic’s Den Delimarsky describes the practical benefit as allowing people to control Sonos through Claude “without breaking their flow.” That small phrase captures a larger change. Instead of stopping what someone is doing, finding the application belonging to a device and operating it there, the device can become reachable from the software environment that person is already using.

What makes the decision more revealing is that Sonos is doing this while building an AI assistant of its own.

Sonos 27voice is expected to enter Early Access later this fall and is being designed specifically around music, mood and control. Sonos wants it to understand the imperfect language people often use when talking about music: remembering the feeling of a song instead of its title, describing an atmosphere instead of naming a playlist or trying to find something from fragments of information.

Building that assistant while simultaneously opening Sonos to ChatGPT, Claude and other AI systems might once have looked contradictory. Sonos sees the two approaches as complementary. “We don’t believe one assistant should own the home. One assistant can’t be great at everything,” Chief Innovation Officer Nick Millington says. Sonos 27voice can concentrate on music and control while the company’s open platform allows listeners to bring in, as Millington puts it, “whatever’s great at the rest.”

That is the larger play inside the September 8 announcement.

Sonos does not have to correctly predict which artificial-intelligence company ultimately becomes the assistant people use most. It can instead make Sonos useful to multiple assistants. If someone chooses ChatGPT, the speakers can be there. If someone chooses Claude, the speakers can be there. And because 27mcp is built around Model Context Protocol rather than an exclusive relationship with one AI company, Sonos is positioning the system around interoperability rather than a single winner.

If the AI people choose changes, the speakers do not necessarily have to.

That is particularly important for a company selling physical products designed to remain in people’s homes for years. AI software can change extraordinarily quickly. A speaker does not. By separating the intelligence interpreting a person’s request from the hardware carrying it out, Sonos can potentially let the software surrounding its products evolve without requiring those products to disappear with every change in the AI market.

It also places Sonos inside a broader shift in what an AI assistant can be. ChatGPT and Claude began primarily as places where people went to ask questions and generate information. Increasingly, AI systems are being designed to interact with outside services and perform actions. For that transition to matter beyond the screen, those systems need products willing to accept their instructions.

Sonos is now one of them.

The distinction is important. Sonos is not handing ChatGPT ownership of its speakers, and ChatGPT is not becoming the Sonos operating system. Sonos remains responsible for what happens across its audio system. What is changing is the path through which a person’s intention can reach it. The intelligence understanding the request and the system executing that request no longer have to come from the same company.

Sonos 27 provides the architecture around that idea. The update also introduces a redesigned app experience and new ways of moving sound among Sonos products, reinforcing that the company is not replacing its own interface. CEO Tom Conrad describes Sonos’s larger philosophy by saying, “Our system grows more capable and smarter over time.” With 27mcp, that increasingly means hardware already sitting inside someone’s home can acquire a new way of being controlled without the speaker itself being replaced.

Sonos is already indicating that the idea could go further. Custom Agents, targeted for 2027, are expected to let people create agents using different models, personas and voices. That does not mean Sonos knows what the dominant AI interface will look like a year from now. The architecture suggests it may not need to.

There are limits to what September 8 proves. Sonos 27mcp remains in Early Access. Traditional apps have not disappeared, conversational AI has not become the universal remote for the home, and Sonos itself is investing in a redesigned app as part of the same update. The company is adding another path into its system, not eliminating the paths that already exist.

But that restraint makes the present decision clearer.

The smart-home era was largely built around ecosystems. Companies sold the device and then attempted to keep the customer inside the software, services and assistants surrounding it. Sonos is testing a different position: the company making the physical product does not necessarily have to own every layer between that product and the person using it.

ChatGPT controlling a Sonos speaker is the feature that makes this announcement easy to explain. Sonos allowing the intelligence between you and that speaker to come from somewhere else is the decision that makes it important.

Sonos does not need to know whether ChatGPT, Claude, its own 27voice or something that has not yet arrived becomes the interface someone prefers.

It needs the Sonos system to remain useful when that choice changes.

Whatever AI world you choose, Sonos wants its speakers to still be in the room.