OpenAI's rumoured AI phone is still nowhere in sight, but a Chinese AI startup has already put an agent-first phone on stage. StepFun, an AI unicorn from Sanghai, also known as Jieyue Xingchen, unveiled the StepX Neo at its brand event in Shanghai on July 13. The company is calling it the world's first agentic phone where the large language model is native to the device rather than an app running on top.
StepX Neo Runs an Agentic OS Called Step AOS
The StepX Neo runs Step AOS (Step Agentic-native OS) and StepFun says it's not another Android skin with AI features built on top of it. The company claims it has rebuilt the underlying framework from Android, Linux and RTOS layers so that AI agents sit at the centre of the operating system.
Interestingly, Step AOS breaks down system capabilities like communication, apps, files and settings into smaller units using the MCP (Model Context Protocol) standard.
The AI phone ships with Amoo, StepFun's personal AI agent, which uses a dual-domain memory system to remember user habits and preferences over time. StepFun claims memory recall takes as little as 15 milliseconds and that the memory system ranks on top in benchmarks like LongMemEval.
On the model side, the agentic phone is powered by Step Edge, an on-device AI model. StepFun says it ranks first among on-device AI models across 29 benchmarks. That said, the company has not disclosed which models it has compared with, so take the claim with a pinch of salt.
Now, the execution part is where things get interesting. Amoo uses a "multi-brain" setup that dynamically picks between on-device and cloud models based on how complex the task is. StepFun has also signed up Alipay, WPS, CapCut, Baidu, JD, etc. as launch partners, so the agent can book cabs, order food, plan trips and edit documents across apps.
That said, handing system-level control to an AI agent raises privacy and security questions, but StepFun has addressed them. The company disclosed a framework where agent operations run inside a trusted execution environment and every action is auditable. Permissions are also granted on demand, revoked after use and mistakes can be reversed with a single tap.
StepFun has co-published an agent security whitepaper with the Shanghai AI Laboratory. Notably, the StepX Neo has passed the L3 level of China's national AI terminal intelligence grading standard, which is currently the highest level open for testing. StepFun says it's the only smartphone to hold the L3 certificate so far.
As for the hardware, StepFun has only shown off a dual-camera setup and an interactive secondary display on the rear. The core specifications, pricing and availability have not been announced and there is no word on a launch outside of China either.
By the way, OpenAI's AI phone is expected to arrive in 2028 if everything goes well. But Apple just filed a lawsuit against OpenAI over theft of hardware information, so it's unclear if the AI phone will launch on time.
