Doubao Mobile Assistant rejected by over 170 apps, while its overseas counterpart has secured partnerships with Qualcomm and Lenovo, with Android’s co-founder also showing support.

Beating AI News Flash: Silicon Valley startup AGI Inc. is selling technology similar to Doubao (the Chinese AI assistant) to smartphone manufacturers. In March this year, it announced partnerships with Qualcomm and demonstrated functions including automatic food ordering, ride-hailing, and checkout in Lenovo’s AI assistant Qira. In August, Rich Miner, co-founder of Android, joined the company as an advisor. AGI was co-founded by Div Garg, a Stanford University computer science PhD dropout. It has launched an Android app where users can say commands like “Book an Uber for me” or “Send a message to a friend”; the AI recognizes the phone screen, automatically opens the corresponding app, taps buttons, and fills in information—all without requiring dedicated APIs from third-party apps. The company also developed AGI-0, a model specialized in phone operations, and AGI-RUN, an on-device inference engine, aiming to run AI locally on phones as much as possible to reduce latency and privacy data uploads. AGI has opened the phone MCP interface, allowing agents such as Claude Code and Codex to directly operate Android devices. AGI’s business model is clear: it does not manufacture its own phones, but packages its model, inference engine, and cross-app operation capabilities to supply to smartphone makers, serving as the built-in AI operation layer for next-generation mobile systems. China’s Doubao assistant is also following this technical path, but has faced resistance from third-party apps. As of November 4, over 170 apps including WeChat, Taobao, and Meituan have explicitly refused to allow Doubao to perform operations on users’ behalf.