The US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of INMO's Air3 smart glasses on September 24, 2026. The hazard is specific: the left temple — the arm that rests over the ear — can overheat during extended use, and the company has logged ten reports of it happening, including burns described as a burning sensation to the face and ear. The recall notice doesn't cite any hospitalizations, but CPSC's hazard classification for this kind of overheating covers serious injury or worse, which is why this became a recall rather than a routine advisory.
Who's affected
The recall covers roughly 1,643 units sold in the US and another 120 in Canada — a small run, consistent with a niche AI-glasses maker rather than a mass-market brand. The glasses were sold online through Amazon, INMO's own site and a Kickstarter campaign between December 2025 and August 2026, and are built for real-time AI translation, on-device assistance and video streaming — the same category of feature Meta and others are now building into more mainstream glasses.
How a recall like this actually happens
A CPSC recall isn't the agency unilaterally pulling a product off shelves. It's a corrective action a company agrees to after reporting a hazard, or after the agency's own investigation finds one, and it comes with a specific remedy the firm commits to providing — a repair, a replacement or a refund. INMO's ten reports were apparently enough for the company to agree to both a firmware fix and a repair program rather than contest the finding, which is the more common outcome once a pattern of the same failure shows up across unrelated users.
What INMO is offering
INMO's remedy has two parts: the company is helping affected owners update their glasses to system version V3.16, and separately offering a free repair for recalled units. The CPSC notice tells owners to stop using the glasses immediately rather than keep wearing them while either fix is pending. This isn't a refund-only recall, which suggests INMO believes the hazard is addressable in units already sold rather than a fault that requires replacement hardware.
Why this shows up in glasses now
A phone or a laptop has room to spread heat across a case, and often a fan; a temple arm a few millimeters wide, worn against skin for hours, doesn't. On-device AI processing — running translation or assistance locally instead of just streaming audio, the way a pair of Bluetooth earbuds does — draws more power and generates more heat than the components older wearables were built around, and there's very little room in a glasses temple to dissipate it. That's a physical constraint every AI-glasses maker is working against right now, not a flaw unique to one company — and it's one more reason to read a manufacturer's battery-life or performance claim on a device this size the way Meta's own Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 numbers should be read: as the company's own figures, not something anyone outside it has independently measured.
What to do if you own a pair
Stop wearing them, and check the recall notice for your exact model and date code before doing anything else — INMO's contact channels walk through registering the unit for the system update and the repair. This recall doesn't extend to any other maker's glasses, including Meta's; it's specific to the Air3's temple design and the ten cases INMO reported to CPSC. If someone you know owns a pair and hasn't seen this, it's worth passing along directly — a recall notice reaches people through CPSC's own site and news coverage, not through a push notification on the glasses themselves, so it's easy to miss unless you were already looking for it this week.
The timing lands the same week AI glasses got their highest-profile push yet: Meta pushed a software update to its screen-equipped Ray-Ban Meta Display days before this recall posted. Two different companies, two different kinds of problem — but both are reminders that this hardware category is still new enough that a lot of it is running ahead of independent testing.
Last updated September 26, 2026