Doubao mobile assistant rejected by over 170 apps, while its overseas counterpart partners with Qualcomm and Lenovo, with Android co-founder also showing support

Beating AI News Flash: Silicon Valley startup AGI Inc. is selling technology similar to Doubao's mobile assistant to phone manufacturers.

In March of this year, it successively announced a partnership with Qualcomm and demonstrated automatic food ordering, ride-hailing, and checkout in Lenovo's AI assistant Qira. In August, Android co-founder Rich Miner also joined the company as an advisor.

AGI was co-founded by Div Garg, a Stanford computer science PhD dropout. It has already launched an Android app where users only need to say "Order me an Uber" or "Send a message to a friend," and the AI can recognize the phone screen, automatically open the corresponding app, tap buttons, and fill in information. The entire process does not require third-party apps to specifically open APIs.

The company has also trained a dedicated phone-operating model AGI-0 and developed an on-device inference engine AGI-RUN, hoping to run AI locally on the phone as much as possible to reduce latency and private data uploads. AGI has also opened a mobile MCP interface, allowing agents such as Claude Code and Codex to directly operate Android phones.

AGI's business path is very clear: it does not build phones itself, but packages the model, inference engine, and cross-app operation capabilities to provide to phone manufacturers, becoming the built-in AI operation layer of next-generation phone systems.

China's Doubao mobile assistant is also following this technical route, but has already encountered resistance from third-party apps. As of November 4, more than 170 apps, including WeChat, Taobao, and Meituan, have explicitly refused to let Doubao operate on behalf of users.