China is pushing ahead in the race to build fully autonomous, AI-driven smartphones with the unveiling of a groundbreaking prototype developed by ZTE in partnership with ByteDance. The device, called the Nubia M153, integrates ByteDance’s Doubao AI agent directly at the operating system layer—allowing it to navigate the phone’s interface, run apps, make transactions, and perform complex tasks exactly as a human user would.
Entrepreneur Taylor Ogan, who shared a demo of the device on X, showed the AI completing real-world tasks autonomously. In one test, Ogan asked the AI to hire someone to stand in line for him—a service common in China’s gig economy. The phone independently chose the correct app, filled out the necessary forms, and prepared the request without any manual input. Other demonstrations showed the AI booking a hotel using only a photo of the building, ordering drone-delivered drinks via Meituan, arranging a robotaxi through Baidu Apollo, and even negotiating with automated customer-service bots on the user’s behalf.
The prototype runs on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chipset with 16GB RAM and uses a dual-layer AI architecture. Doubao handles cloud-based reasoning while Nebula-GUI, a 7-billion-parameter on-device model trained by ZTE, executes precise interface actions like tapping, typing, or navigating menus. This setup ensures fast performance while keeping sensitive interactions—such as passwords or payments—on the device.
The system demonstrates app-level intelligence previously unseen in global smartphone markets. It can identify user interfaces visually, understand context using multimodal reasoning, and execute multi-step tasks without instructions about which apps to use. While it is still a prototype, analysts say the technology signals a major shift in how smartphones may operate in the future. China’s integrated AI-mobile ecosystem may now be leading the race toward the world’s first true agentic smartphone.
