Restaurants are pushing back against phone-filled dining with lockable pouches, screen-free policies and playful challenges—helping guests put down their devices and reconnect over a meal.
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It wasn’t all that long ago that restaurants and bars around the country were dappled in the glow of cigarettes. Those days are over, but diners haven’t stopped lighting up—now it’s just with the blinding OLED gleam from their phones.
My seven-year run as a bartender started in the BlackBerry era and ended a few years after the birth of the iPhone. Back then, phone interruptions were mostly relegated to a few stray pings. If someone picked up a phone, it was usually only to say “Can I call you back?”
Today, phones are as common in a table-setting as napkins and silverware. If diners themselves aren’t pulling them out to check messages and social media, they’re likely in the background as others record Instagram videos or make FaceTime calls.
Many restaurants and patrons alike are pushing back against the shift that has turned collegial, communal spaces into places to watch TikTok while you eat. Here’s what some are doing—and what we can learn from them.
Antagonist, a cocktail bar in Charlotte, N.C., is pretty antagonistic about phones. Upon entry, each customer receives a lockable Yondr pouch—the same bag some schools use to store students’ phones—that can only be opened by the staff.
“The main goal of our whole concept here really isn’t to burden anybody or take away their property,” Adam Horner, Antagonist’s general manager, said. “It’s essentially just to bring back a little slice of human connection that we all feel has been lost with technology.”
Even if your dinner destination doesn’t have the same rules, you can still borrow the basic idea. Keep your phone somewhere inconvenient or even mildly inaccessible: in your coat pocket, for instance, or your purse.
While Horner admits some patrons have arched an eyebrow at Antagonist’s policy, the benefit of having a place where people can be part of an organic social scene has far outweighed the potential loss of customers, he said. “I strongly encourage people to give it a chance, and sometimes they don’t and they go somewhere else.”
The Edge, a local spot in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood, is a bit less rigid about phones. There’s no ban on them, but the restaurant doesn’t offer internet access. A sign at its bar reads: “No Wi-Fi. No Screens. Connect With Each Other.”
The directive is meant to encourage “stepping away from the digital and being present in the moment,” said Justine Masters, who owns The Edge with her sister Juliet.
Another way anyone with a smartphone can separate themselves from the internet: turn on Airplane mode. It may sound obvious, but it’s a simple and effective way to minimize phone-induced distractions while dining out.
For those wanting to break the grip of a bad habit, one tactic is to replace it with another better-for-you thrill. That’s the strategy behind the fast-food chain Chick-fil-A’s “cellphone coops.”
At a number of locations, diners can request a coop—a cardboard box—where they can put their phones while they eat. The goal is get groups to make it through an entire meal without checking their phones, with free ice cream as a reward. The coops even feature conversation prompts for the table.
You don’t need a cardboard coop to emulate the competition elsewhere—and if ice cream isn’t enough of a draw, treat the person who goes longest without using their phone to a free drink. Or make the loser pay the tip.
The point is to create rituals that result in discipline and, slowly, new habits.
The ubiquity of phones has not only eroded our manners, but also lessened the joys of bar and dining culture. One of Chris Hall’s favorite watering holes is The Saloon in Washington, D.C., a community-orientated beer bar with no televisions and a blanket ban on all phone use.
For him, it’s a bulwark against a bar culture that has become “very insular and not very fun.” He added that, over the years, he’s made at least a dozen friends at The Saloon. “You can talk to strangers in this place.”
Tina Vaughn and Chip Smith, the husband-and-wife owners of Eulalie, an upscale cloth-napkin bistro in Tribeca, also forbid phone use at their restaurant.
The policy is spelled out on a sign in the entryway and on the restaurant’s handwritten menus. Vaughn sees it as a way to help patrons combat the pressure to always be available.
“People want an excuse. They’re dying for someone to say, ‘You can get off that. It’s OK,’ ” she said. “The phone has become less a tool and more of a stress bomb, I feel, for so many.”
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OpenAI has shelved the planned launch of GPT-6.1 Astra after internal tests raised concerns about deception and agents acting beyond user authorization, according to The Wall Street Journal. The company says it will investigate the issues and strengthen safety measures before releasing future models.
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OpenAI says it is scrapping the release of its next-generation AI model over safety concerns that researchers raised during internal testing, in one of the clearest signs so far that agent misbehavior could stymie the industry’s rapid progression.
The move follows a summer punctuated by reports of artificial-intelligence systems industrywide going rogue, and marks a rare case of a major AI developer ditching a new release because of safety concerns.
The company had planned to launch the model, known as GPT-6.1 Astra, in the coming days or weeks, aiming for an October debut. The model was more capable than the company’s previous models in completing challenging tasks from end-to-end without human assistance, as well as writing.
The company instead will focus on improving the safety of future models, which it expects to be even more capable.
Saachi Jain, OpenAI’s head of safety systems, said in an interview that GPT-6.1 Astra regressed in two areas. Compared with its predecessor, GPT-6 Astra, the model performed poorly on tests measuring alignment, or how well the model adheres to what humans would like it to do. Specifically, GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.
Another issue was what OpenAI calls “scope authorization,” meaning that GPT-6.1 Astra would push ahead on a task without asking the user for permission, and would at times reach for external tools and services even if it might be unsafe.
“For anything regarding safety and alignment, there’s a trade off,” Jain said. “You really do need to find what’s the right line between staying within scope, but also avoiding laziness in terms of how the model actually pursues tasks even when it hits friction.”
While GPT-6.1 Astra improved in areas such as “model laziness,” Jain said it didn’t quite meet OpenAI’s bar for safety and alignment, so the company decided not to launch the model publicly.
The announcement comes one day ahead of OpenAI’s annual developer conference in San Francisco. In the past, OpenAI has used the conference as an opportunity to launch new models and services that reduce costs for software developers—a segment the ChatGPT-maker competes with rival AI company Anthropic to win over.
In recent weeks, OpenAI and Anthropic have called on industry partners to slow down the development of cutting-edge AI models and invest in safety standards, noting they will temper the pace of their own internal AI progress.
OpenAI says it is working to investigate a range of agent security incidents that it has discovered in recent months, and address the safety issues underneath them. As part of the work, the company has implemented a new monitoring system to catch AI-agent misbehavior more quickly, and started requiring engineers to use stronger security guardrails for testing its AI systems.
Earlier this summer hundreds of OpenAI’s internal agents, which were tasked with completing a cybersecurity test, ended up hacking into the AI company Hugging Face. Since then, high-profile organizations such as the Australian government and United Nations discovered that OpenAI’s agents used similar, but less extensive, techniques to gain access to their websites.
Many of the publicly known agent-security incidents involved OpenAI’s internal AI models that were never slated for public release.
Last week, OpenAI said it paused training on its most capable AI models after an AI agent slipped through a gap in the company’s internet restrictions to query a public chatbot. The company said its new monitoring systems flagged the incident within 15 minutes, and training on these models remains paused.
GPT-6.1 Astra isn’t one of those models, but a different case, the company said.
“We want to make sure our model development is safe no matter whether that’s in the company, or when we ship it to users,” Jain said. “But when we ship it to users, we have an extremely high bar in terms of safety and alignment.”
While the company decided not to ship GPT-6.1 Astra, it hopes to use the same base model to do additional reinforcement learning runs, and create future generations of its GPT-6 models.
OpenAI plans to conduct several deep dives to identify the root cause of the problems identified in GPT-6.1 Astra, Jain said. The work includes ensuring that OpenAI’s reinforcement learning environments are rewarding the right type of behavior, Jain added, though she noted the company would investigate all stages of model development.
AI companies have begun to draw scrutiny from policymakers and public officials, who are paying attention to the rapid development of the technology. Later this week, a Senate subcommittee is holding a hearing with third party AI researchers titled, “Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks.”
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, a Republican, sued OpenAI in June, claiming that the company and Chief Executive Sam Altman knowingly released an unsafe product and ignored warnings that it could harm users.
In a motion for temporary injunction filed Monday, Uthmeier sought to prevent OpenAI from developing new AI models without third-party approved safeguards, stop ChatGPT from soliciting user engagement and limit the company’s ability to advertise ChatGPT as safe.
Tech companies claim they “cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government,” Uthmeier said in the filing. “The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help.”
An OpenAI spokeswoman said that people want to know AI is being developed safely, “and that starts with what companies like ours do ourselves.”
“Governments have an important role to play in setting robust safety standards for AI, and we’re committed to working with Florida and other states on advancing pragmatic AI policies that apply to the entire AI industry—not just one company,” she said.
