Within the app, you can add safe zones, more pets with Fi trackers, and other users who can also track and monitor the pet. There’s a Health tab where you can add and store things like vet records, receipts, and insurance information, and add vets to easily share your pet’s documents and get appointment reminders. You can also set up the Fi app on your Apple Watch to have even quicker access to monitor your pet’s location, activity, and safety (including Lost Mode) without needing a phone.

When you open the app, you’ll see a map with live tracking showing where your pet is currently, as well as a notification of the last time they were outside and where they were. With the latter, you can pull up stats like location timeline, showing where they were and when. If you dive into any day when the tracker left the home, it will recreate the route, following the path and calculating the distance the pet traveled.

There’s also health-monitoring data from activity and sleep tracking, which is most useful for an indoor-only pet like mine. Like other health-tracking collars, stats for sleep and activity aren’t 100 percent accurate, as the app uses GPS to track movement, categorizing “activity” when the animal is moving and “sleep” when the pet is still for a prolonged period. This means that if Basil was awake but stationary, the app may inaccurately categorize this as sleep.

In the Rest tab, you can see sleep metrics, including a daily summary of deep sleep, naps, and interruptions during nightly sleep. You can compare this over time, and the app notes how much more or less Basil slept than the night before. It also compares stats historically, by week, month, and year, so you can track trends and better understand your pet’s normal sleep schedule.

The Activity tab is similar, tracking activity by day, week, and month, noting in the day’s timeline when the pet was most active and for how long. This also compares activity to the day before. I liked looking at the weekly report, comparing days during the week to see which he was most active during and if any patterns in activity popped up.

For example, I noticed that his sleep-versus-activity schedule was similar to mine, except he was active between 4:45 and 6:30 am (while I was still asleep), because that’s when his automatic feeder goes off for breakfast and my roommate is getting ready to leave for work. He was most active in the evenings, when I feed him dinner, have dedicated playtime, and my roommates are home, so there’s more activity to keep him awake. Historical comparison is also a super helpful way to track whether your pet is sleeping more or becoming more lethargic—an early warning sign of a bigger health problem.

Not Without Its Quirks

Since my cat is indoor-only, I ran some experiments to track location, using GPS on both the Fi Mini tracker and my phone. I also had a friend take the tracker out without my phone nearby to see whether I’d get pinged that “Basil” had left the safe zone.

Although it is better than not being alerted at all, the Fi’s GPS has limitations (as did the Tractive tracker I tested). It needs a strong signal to communicate with cell towers for accurate location. If your phone is close to the smart collar (via Bluetooth), it uses that instead of the Fi’s GPS, making it more accurate and alerting quicker. If the pet gets loose and is out of range of your phone, it uses the collar’s cellular antenna (in this case, Verizon cell towers). But because the Fi’s antenna isn’t as strong as a phone’s, location accuracy is lower, and the connection can be very spotty, especially if your pet is in the country or on acreage where cell towers are farther away.

The other goal of the Button is rapid response time. Unlike the Humane Ai pin, which got lots of criticism for taking a painfully long time to reply to queries, the Button is designed to be nearly instantaneous. In a demo via Zoom call, I watched Nolet ask the Button for a recommendation for the best sandwich shops in my neighborhood. While the Button didn’t choose my idea of the best sandwich place around, it did at least answer all the questions within a second. It can also be immediately interrupted by pressing the button, which is a great feature for people like me who cannot tell a chatbot to shut up fast enough.

Nolet is unapologetic about the very clear Apple ethos you might be able to suss out in the design.

“The Humane pin felt a little geeky to wear, right?” Nolet says. “But the iPod shuffle? Really cool. That’s where the idea started, and then we just put all of our Apple-esque expertise into it and tried to refine it into something that we thought would actually be useful.”

Nearly all their product images and videos show the Button being used as a wearable, but Nolet insists the device can also be kept in a pocket, bag, or car glove box as well.

“My cofounder says we can’t tell people it looks cool; they have to decide,” Nolet says. “Our intention is to build something that is kind of fashionable, but it’s up to you guys to tell us if it’s cool.”

Though Apple has long been a leader in technological coolness, it has struggled in the virtual reality space, specifically with its too expensive, too heavy Vision Pro and that devices complicated rollout. Apple is not alone on that front. Meta is actively rejiggering support for its VR efforts. Nolet posits that part of the reason for that instability is that VR has required building hardware and the software ecosystems to support it at the same time.

“There was no software innovation that we were anchored to as an industry, so I think it’s quite a hard pitch,” Nolet says. “It’s much, much easier to stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Anthropic “has not satisfied the stringent requirements” to temporarily lose the supply-chain-risk designation imposed by the Pentagon, a US appeals court in Washington, DC, ruled on Wednesday. The decision is at odds with one issued last month by a lower court judge in San Francisco, and it wasn’t immediately clear how the conflicting preliminary judgments would be resolved.

The government sanctioned Anthropic under two different supply-chain laws with similar effects, and the San Francisco and Washington, DC, courts are each ruling on only one of them. Anthropic has said it is the first US company to be designated under the two laws, which are typically used to punish foreign businesses that pose a risk to national security.

“Granting a stay would force the United States military to prolong its dealings with an unwanted vendor of critical AI services in the middle of a significant ongoing military conflict,” the three-judge appellate panel wrote on Wednesday in what they described as an unprecedented case. The panel said that while Anthropic may suffer financial harm from the ongoing designation, they did not want to risk “a substantial judicial imposition on military operations” or “lightly override” the military’s judgments on national security.

The San Francisco judge had found that the Department of Defense likely acted in bad faith against Anthropic, driven by frustration over the AI company’s proposed limits on how its technology could be used and its public criticism of those restrictions. The judge ordered the supply-chain risk label removed last week, and the Trump administration complied by restoring access to Anthropic AI tools inside the Pentagon and throughout the rest of the federal government.

Anthropic spokesperson Danielle Cohen says the company is grateful the Washington, DC, court “recognized these issues need to be resolved quickly” and remains confident “the courts will ultimately agree that these supply chain designations were unlawful.”

The Department of Defense did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but acting attorney general Todd Blanche posted a statement on X. “Today’s DC Circuit stay allowing the government to designate Anthropic as a supply-chain risk is a resounding victory for military readiness,” he wrote.
“Our position has been clear from the start—our military needs full access to Anthropic’s models if its technology is integrated into our sensitive systems.

Military authority and operational control belong to the Commander-in-Chief and Department of War, not a tech company.”

The cases are testing how much power the executive branch has over the conduct of tech companies. The battle between Anthropic and the Trump administration is also playing out as the Pentagon deploys AI in its war against Iran. The company has argued it is being illegally punished for insisting that its AI tool Claude lacks the accuracy needed for certain sensitive operations such as carrying out deadly drone strikes without human supervision.

Several experts in government contracting and corporate rights have told WIRED that Anthropic has a strong case against the government, but the courts sometimes refuse to overrule the White House on matters related to national security. Some AI researchers have said the Pentagon’s actions against Anthropic “chills professional debate” about the performance of AI systems.

Anthropic has claimed in court that it lost business because of the designation, which government lawyers contend bars the Pentagon and its contractors from using the company’s Claude AI as part of military projects. And as long as Trump remains in power, Anthropic may not be able to regain the significant foothold it held in the federal government.

Final decisions in the company’s two lawsuits could be months away. The Washington court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on May 19.

The parties have revealed minimal details so far about how exactly the Department of Defense has used Claude or how much progress it has made in transitioning staff to other AI tools from Google DeepMind, OpenAI, or others. The military, which under President Trump calls itself the Department of War, has said it has taken steps to ensure Anthropic can’t purposely try to sabotage its AI tools during the transition.

Update 4/8/26 7:27 EDT: This story has been updated to include a statement form acting attorney general Todd Blanche.