(Yicai) Sept. 30 -- Four more artificial intelligence agent smartphones received network access approval from the Chinese government yesterday, following the Nubia NaviX Ultra, equipped with the Doubao Mobile Assistant, which became the first AI agent mobile phone to obtain telecom equipment access approval late last month.

Three of the four AI agent smartphones are models from Honor’s Magic 9 series, while the fourth is the STEPX Neo, the first AI agent mobile phone built natively around a large language model and developed by STEPX, which is a subsidiary of LLM developer StepFun, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s website.

The approval and launch of multiple AI agent smartphones mark the point at which handsets that had previously been showcased mainly at product launch events and technological demonstrations are now entering the market for testing.

Unlike conventional mobile phones that have added AI features such as question answering and image generation, AI agent mobile phones seek to fundamentally change how users interact with their devices. After a user assigns a task, the agent can interpret the request, access system functions and third-party applications as well as carry out a series of actions autonomously.

Yicai noted significant differences in how the three companies are implementing AI agents. Honor has added a system-level Agent Harness framework to its self-developed MagicOS operating system to support agent orchestration. STEPX has developed a LLM-native AI agent smartphone. Meanwhile, Doubao uses a phone-assistant model to enable AI to directly operate third-party applications at the application level.

As smartphone replacement cycles lengthen and the overall market remains under pressure, handset makers are in need of new product selling points. However, whether AI can become a compelling enough reason for consumers to upgrade their devices remains to be tested by the market.

China’s smartphone shipments slumped 4.2 percent in the first half from a year ago to approximately 134 million units, according to US market research firm IDC.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Kim Taylor