ZTE's Nubia brand confirmed on July 8 that its next flagship handset will be built around a system-level AI agent rather than a bolt-on chatbot app, with Ni Fei, senior vice president of ZTE and president of its mobile devices division, describing it as the world's first "AI agent smartphone." The device is set to make its public debut at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC) in Shanghai, running July 17-20, where Shanghai municipal officials also confirmed the phone as one of the event's headline product debuts alongside humanoid robots and AI dexterous hands.

An agent that runs the phone, not just a chat window

Most AI features on phones today answer questions or generate content inside a dedicated assistant app. Nubia's pitch is different: the agent, powered by ByteDance's Doubao AI, is embedded at the operating-system level and can take over the whole device on a user's behalf. Reporting on the announcement describes a GUI-agent architecture paired with an on-device large language model that visually interprets the phone's interface and operates it directly, rather than depending solely on app-specific APIs — a design meant to let it work across apps that were never built with an agent in mind.

A concrete example: booking a flight hands-free

Nubia's own demo scenario is a flight booking: a user asks the agent to find the cheapest ticket, and it opens the relevant travel apps, compares prices across them, fills in personal details, and processes payment without the user touching the screen. That kind of end-to-end, payment-authorizing autonomy is a meaningfully bigger trust ask than existing on-device assistants, which mostly stop short of unsupervised purchases.

Building on a phone that already sold out

The upcoming device follows Nubia's M153, an earlier Doubao-branded phone that sold out its entire 30,000-unit first batch within a day of its December 2025 China launch at 3,499 yuan (roughly $480). Nubia has not yet disclosed hardware specs, pricing, or a commercial release date for the new WAIC model, saying those details will come alongside the Shanghai debut.

Why it matters

Nubia's launch is a concrete signal that phone makers see OS-level, action-taking agents — not chat assistants — as the next competitive battleground, particularly in China where ByteDance, Huawei and others are racing to embed agentic AI directly into hardware. For a category still working out how much autonomy users will trust an agent with, a phone that can complete a purchase without any screen interaction is a useful real-world test case to watch.