A Shanghai startup built a phone around an AI agent. The hardware, price, and launch date are still secret.

StepFun, a Shanghai AI startup, unveiled the StepX Neo smartphone at a Shanghai event on July 13, calling it the "world's first agentic phone." The pitch: an operating system, Step AOS, designed so an AI agent called Amoo plans and executes tasks across apps rather than waiting inside a single chatbot. Ask it to book a table, text a friend, and add it to your calendar, and the idea is that the agent clicks the buttons itself.

The hardware, price, and launch date have not been disclosed. StepFun, founded in April 2023, has raised $718 million from Shanghai State-owned Capital Investment and added phone ODM Huaqin Technology in a follow-on round; Tencent is also a reported backer. It was the first Chinese lab to release a one-trillion-parameter language model about two years ago.

The benchmark story is the company's own. StepFun says its on-device model, Step Edge, ranks first among similar models across 29 benchmarks, and that long-term memory retrieval runs in as little as 15 milliseconds. Neither claim has been independently tested in public materials. Yicai reports the device is still being prepared, with Longcheer and OmniVision among the supply-chain partners involved.