Cofounder, Apple
Steve Wozniak’s Warning: The Unseen Risk of AI-Powered Scams in 2026
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak joins 'The Claman Countdown' to reflect on Apple's 50th anniversary, weigh in on the rise of AI ...
About Steve Wozniak
In a July 2025 interview, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak discussed the early days of the company, describing himself as the engineer who designed the Apple II, which he said was the only product generating revenue for Apple in its first decade. He stated that Steve Jobs did not have the ability to design hardware or software and that Jobs learned marketing principles from investor Mike Markkula. Wozniak also said he initially gave away his computer designs for free to help start the personal computer revolution. Speaking at the A3F 2026 conference in Zurich in June 2026, Wozniak reflected on his early passion for digital technology and his goal of building useful products for everyday people. He expressed skepticism about artificial intelligence replacing human workers, citing the need for human oversight and concerns about deepfakes and scams. Wozniak attributed Apple's later massive growth to the business thinking of the people who ran the company after its first decade, rather than to his own engineering contributions.
Transcript (32 segments)
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Narrator0:00
From floppy discs to FaceTime, Apple is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The tech giant kicked off the celebrations March 13th with a special performance from 17-time Grammy Award winner Alicia Keys at New York City's Grand Central Station. Apple taking the festivities worldwide with all kinds of events in China, Thailand, South Korea, and it'll make its way back to Apple Park in Cupertino, California next week for the company's official anniversary on April 1st. But it all began back in 1976 with these two guys. Steve Jobs was the marketing genius behind propelling Apple computer to its now $3.7 trillion valuation. Meanwhile, Steve Wozniak was the engineering brain behind it all, inventing the company's first computers, the Apple 1 and the big hit Apple 2.
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Interviewer0:50
Joining me now is Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Steve, wow. I mean, first of all, 50 years. Does it even feel like that for you?
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Steve Wozniak1:02
Um, I don't have time. Time just tells us that it always moves forward. It only moves in one direction. No, I couldn't tell you if it was 30. I don't do years. I don't do years. I mean, even it's our anniversary today and I don't know how many years. I just count days. I just count days. 6,436 days today.
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Interviewer1:21
Okay. Wow. You had that on the tip of your tongue. You know, we go back to the Apple 1 personal computer. First released what? April 11th in '76. It lacked a case.
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Steve Wozniak1:31
April 1.
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Interviewer1:32
April. April 1.
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Steve Wozniak1:33
Well, we formed our partnership on April 1. April 1st.
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Interviewer1:36
Got it. This thing lacked a case, lacked a power supply, no keyboard, no display. These were all things that had to be provided by the users. What was it like? Take us back to the moment you were building that computer. What was it like when you pressed the on button and it actually worked?
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Steve Wozniak1:55
Well, I was influenced by a lot of people that believed that computers were going to change society. It was the Homebrew Computer Club and they were all trying to build computers by the standard method and I built one of my own design five years before that. I just wanted something to be more human that you could really use like a typewriter and you could type in programs and it was a useful computer at an affordable price and I had a different approach. So, I would show it off. That's the only way I could communicate. I was too shy to actually go up and talk to people and I'd show off things I designed. And I didn't really intend to start a company or a business. I was a great computer designer. But I didn't want to get rich or anything. I just wanted other engineers to see some amazing things I was thinking up and when I had this Apple 1 computer down at the Homebrew Computer Club, it wasn't designed by me as a computer. It was not a walking computer. It was something I built before to get on the ARPANET, which is now the internet, but six far away computers across the country and I could access them for free on the ARPANET. And I built a machine that could do that. And I transformed it into a computer by adding the brains, the microprocessor, and the right memory. And I wanted an affordable and people at the home computer club looking over my shoulder. Every single computer after I was showing this off that came out would have a keyboard and a video display. It became a change in how computers looked and felt and it was much more human. So I don't know. It was great. I just wanted other engineers to see it and respect my brilliance. And I've gotten noted by the engineering community quite a bit now. I'm a fellow in the IEEE and I hope to someday get their Medal of Honor.
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Interviewer3:37
Oh, someday. I'm on the phone with them after the show. You need it. But when you turned it on and it actually worked when you created it, that's what I want to know. Was Steve Jobs there? Were you guys high-fiving each other? What was that moment like?
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Steve Wozniak3:51
Well, at first I had this terminal could call far away computers and oh, I got in my mind microprocessor is something I'd been designing all through high school, these processors and wanted my own computer and told my dad I'd have one. Even if it cost as much as a house, I'd have a computer and live in an apartment. And so I built this thing up and I could actually I was down at Hewlett-Packard one night and I just wrote enough of a program had to be programmed into two chips to have 256 bytes of a program and I could actually type on the keyboard and it would pop in the display. And I just knew that this was what I wanted to show off to people that a computer and a display could be all-in-one to lower the cost.
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Interviewer4:33
Computers started off the size of entire rooms and then they started shrinking. They got smaller and smaller and now arguably we've got the smartphone in our hands which is a baby computer. What do you think the next iteration of the personal computer will look like? And is it even going to be something like a laptop?
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Steve Wozniak4:53
I think it's going to be something similar to today handheld. And the reason I come up with that is cars. How much did they change in their perspective? Four wheels on the ground, a container that can fit certain number of people and it could take you to the useful places. It didn't change much for 150 years. And so I don't think once you find a really good formula, plateau things people want. Are we going to go to, oh, I just have to think thoughts and I don't have to do any work at all. I love my best device today actually is a wearable. It's a watch and I use my watch and I use my computer even more than my phone. So, where's it going? I think it's still going to be very much like today. We've shown the value of that and I don't know. Define me a way that we can really do it. Oh, put a chip in the brain. The brain just has to think and things happen. I don't believe in that.
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Interviewer5:44
If you could embed one principle from the early Apple into AI today or any computer that's AI enabled, what would that principle be?
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Steve Wozniak5:56
Well, obviously honesty, because it's been the highest principle of my life. Don't say things that sound good, say things that are real and you know them. And that would be one advice to AI. Another would be, you know, we can make a brain but trouble is it takes nine months.
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Interviewer6:15
That's a slight trouble. But it wasn't just a product, it was a huge turning point in the personal computer world and then all the competitors came in. But there's something about Apple I just remember back in the day where everybody talked about how, oh well, that's for graphic artists, remember in the 80s and early 90s, oh those are for graphic artists and now everybody has them.
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Steve Wozniak6:37
That's because a company Adobe invented Photoshop, but it needed enough memory and only Macintoshes had that much memory because they needed that much. So, it would only run on our computers. And my god, that changed the world a lot too. And it got us associated with the idea of creativity. Creative people will buy Apples. No, anybody wanted to do work with photos had to have an Apple.
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Interviewer7:01
Do you think that they'll advance at some point to where you can control it with your eyes? I'm always just trying to think of things that somebody like you would think about.
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Steve Wozniak7:12
Um, I wouldn't think of all these human eye and brain control things because they've kind of been too slow to really do useful work. And it's kind of interesting and fun when you play with it, which I have, but no, you want to change the world and do useful things.
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Interviewer7:32
Well, one of the things that you did change the world on after you temporarily left Apple because you were always a disruptor, you disrupted the concert world and we could sit here and talk about the 50th anniversary and the iPhone. Everybody knows those stories. They don't know about the US Festival unless you're a Californian like me, but this was the first sort of cosmic clash or crash of music and technology on stage. You had these three-day concerts with huge screens that were on the stage to...
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Steve Wozniak8:01
First time ever a screen in the United States at a concert, a largest stage ever. First time ever, an amphitheater that we've built for maybe 50 million of today's dollars at a county park. And halfway into it, we had speakers with the delayed sound to delay it the right amount. But it was the first three space bridges with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, not even perestroika, it was very shocking. We sent them video, they sent us video using equipment and methods that had been set up for the 1980 Olympics that the United States backed out of because Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. I did a lot over time many more years after that peace with the Soviet Union, even put on the first concert in a stadium outside of Moscow that had top American groups and top Russian groups. That was important to me, but we didn't get we got a ton of publicity in Russia, but nothing in the United States because Russian United States prime media just wasn't interested in peace type things.
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Interviewer9:03
It feels like you were the kind of person who had joy in figuring things out, joy in creating. Now we've got AI and it figures so much of it out for us. Is there almost a tragedy in that? How do you view that?
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Steve Wozniak9:21
Well, you become dependent on it. Of course, then again, become dependent on a calculator. But I don't like to I don't really I want to know some human being like myself is thinking knowing what I might feel and understanding emotions and all that. And so I've tried a few tests on AI and I'll ask a question, you know, it might be what's the difference between this and that and it'll come back talking about a whole bunch of useful details about this or that but not what the difference is. Or I might say how did the difference come about and you as a human know that I want to know here's a story of how it came about and it'll just give me all the details really well written about the two A and B things. No, I just I want such reliable content every time. I am not a fan of AI.
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Interviewer10:10
I'm really finding this fascinating because I feel like technology in a way makes our lives better, but it also in a way could be making us dumber. I love Waze, which tells you where there's traffic, but now the kids today, kids today, they can't read a map. Are we atrophying our brains in a way?
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Steve Wozniak10:34
Um, yes. Personal computers set that sort of thing in motion. But right now, today is a lot different than we started. For the first two decades of personal computers, you bought a product, you owned it, you set it up your way, and it always ran that way and it solved your problems and let you make presentations of financial data to your managers and it was yours. But now you have to subscribe to services and pay some per month and they'll make changes in how things work and even your muscle memory of where to tap goes away and changes and they'll take things away features that you were using and you can't count on anything. They'll even take your data away sometimes. Oh, just because I don't know you made a mistake and didn't pay a bill one month or something. No, I don't like the business models of today where you don't own it. You are owned. Whoever the suppliers are, you have to go through them on the cloud up to the internet and they own it. So the internet came and things looked beautiful at first and they changed in all the business models. So I'm not a super fan of when I don't feel like I own something. I mean I like a couple of tiny little small simple games because they're on my iPhone, they're on my computer and they don't use the internet. So they actually always work the same.
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Interviewer11:50
Pong. I'm a fan of Pong. Boop boop boop. Before we go, I know we got to go really quickly, but as you look at this 50th anniversary coming up, if you could make one tiny course correction at all in anything that you did in Apple, what would it be?
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Steve Wozniak12:06
Oh, I told myself, rob a bank.
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Interviewer12:08
Why?
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Steve Wozniak12:09
If I had more money, I could have made more choices, more gracious choices in my designs.
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Interviewer12:14
You did just fine, Steve. It's great to have you. Thank you so much and congratulations on the 50th anniversary of Apple.
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Steve Wozniak12:21
I'm honored for you to talk to me. Thank you.
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Interviewer12:23
Great to have you.