“Thinking” caps are dotting the West Village — and no, it’s not the merchandise for a new René Descartes fan club.
The baseball caps come from Anthropic, which hosted a buzzy pop-up with the Air Mail newsstand.
OpenAI handed out coveted token plaques at its Dev Day; Cursor gifted some of its most loyal supporters with “tab” keys.
AI itself is known for its bigness — it’s in the name, large language model. On the ground, techies are going small. AI heads are crawling for exclusive, small-batch merchandise to flaunt on X and show just how inner circle they are.
As AI merch booms, it’s clearer than ever that these companies — both massive foundation model companies and startups — have hit the mainstream. These days, AI status symbols are popping up everywhere.
The AI apparel boom
Anthropic fans could pick up a free tote bag, “thinking” cap, and copy of Dario Amodei’s book — if they were willing to wait in line.
In early October, Anthropic partnered with Graydon Carter’s Air Mail newsstand for a Claude-themed pop-up. The baseball caps quickly went viral, sending hordes of fans to the shop. Eventually, the organizers ran out.
Sunita Mohanty was one of the lucky few to score a cap. The San Francisco-based cofounder of AI healthcare startup Vibrant Practice was on a trip to New York for some meetings when she saw the Claude team’s post on social media.
“It was super packed, and it was clearly all sorts of engineers and builders and startup folks,” Mohanty said. Several attendees looked like they had come with their teams from work, she said, and all were wearing the matching caps.
Mohanty wore her hat on the 6 a.m. flight back to San Francisco. At least two people told her they loved the cap, she said.
Tech merchandise isn’t new. In fact, the “thinking” cap design itself is evocative of several other tech companies, including IBM, whose “think” slogan has long been stitched into hats. More recently, Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines began handing out “thinky” hats that some fans said looked similar.
But the AI boom has taken merchandise to a whole new level, Mohanty said; people want to signal that they’re part of the tech revolution.
“It’s a signal that you’re in the know,” Mohanty said. “You’re working on the most interesting things. You feel like you’re a part of this movement.”
Tech founder Andrew Pignanelli sent his girlfriend to the pop-up. They were out of “thinking” caps by then, but he secured a tote. It’s one of several pieces of AI merchandise that he owns, including a Lego GPU from AI cloud platform Fluidstack.
Pignanelli knows the value of memorable apparel: His AI company, the General Intelligence Company of New York, produced rainbow sweaters emblazoned with their logo. They quickly went viral — and not all for the right reasons.
On X, some users complained that the sweater looked too similar to an ERL Clothing sweater. Critics included Derek Guy, X’s infamous “menswear guy,” who commented, “Kind of funny that an AI company released merch and the instinct was the copy another design.”
“They’re both rainbow sweaters,” Pignanelli said. “We didn’t rip those guys off. It wouldn’t even be possible to do that. They don’t even sell the sweaters anymore.”
On the other side of the backlash, though, was a positive reaction.
“It goes totally viral, and everyone thinks this sweater is super cool and they think they’re super interesting,” he said. He’s since sold about 40 sweaters, he said, and his incoming shipment of 150 more has already sold out.
Pignanelli understands why people are interested in AI merchandise. Apple did it first, he said, with their “think different” campaign. AI is the next generation.
“Everyone wants to feel like they’re part of this class of creatives,” he said.
AI merch is high demand, low supply
At OpenAI’s recent DevDay, the AI giant gave out commemorative plaques. The entry requirement: at least 10 billion tokens purchased.
OpenAI also posted the recipients’ names on the screen behind CEO Sam Altman, showering the developers with praise. Several recipients quickly flexed their new gifts by posting them on X.
One of these recipients was Clay, an AI startup that processed 100 billion tokens. Jeff Barg, Clay’s AI engineering lead, said the company was notified in advance that it would receive a gift.
“In the email we got, they said it would be heavy,” Barg said. “It feels like one of the YouTube commemoration subscriber plaques, so it was very cool.”
The plaque “glows a lot more than the picture indicates” and is “luminescent,” Barg said.
Barg recognized a couple of names on the board. A couple of people he knew made it to one trillion token watermark, he said.
“There was some friendly competition,” Barg said.
OpenAI isn’t the first AI company to gift highly limited — and all the more coveted — merchandise. In August, Cursor’s Ben Lang posted a photo of the company’s large tab button, calling it the company’s “YouTube Play button.”
Within Cursor, users can press tab on their keyboard to autocomplete lines of code. The company’s stand-alone tab button was functional when plugged into a computer.
Elie Steinbock is the founder of Inbox Zero and a Cursor ambassador. He manages local events for the company in Tel Aviv. When he saw the tab key, he reached out. Their criteria, he said, were for anyone who had planned three or more meet-ups, which he had. (Cursor did not respond to a request for comment.)
“It’s not that useful, but it’s cool,” Steinbock said. “If you want a key that just does tab, that’s it. It does it.”
Some of Steinbock’s friends tried to get their hands on a tab button. He was surprised to find out that they couldn’t get one for them.
“It was in limited supply,” Steinbock said. “I guess that makes it cool. It’s a cool thing to have on the shelf.”
Some AI fanatics even have multiple merch items. In an email to Business Insider, Every cofounder Dan Shipper wrote that his OpenAI token plaque “feels great.”
“It’s beautifully made and I’m proud we hit that milestone,” he wrote.
On X, Shipper revealed that he also had the “thinking” cap. His comment there was more lighthearted.
“Thinking cap in the streets,” he wrote. “Token plaque in the sheets.”
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