StepFun Unveils the StepX Neo, the World’s First Agentic Phone

StepFun, a Shanghai artificial intelligence company founded by former Microsoft employees in 2023, unveiled the StepX Neo on July 13, calling it the world’s first mass-market agentic smartphone. The phone runs on an AI agent named Step Amoo that books flights, translates conversations and edits video from a single spoken request, no app-switching required.

StepFun said plenty about the software running underneath. It said almost nothing about price, launch date or what hardware actually sits inside the case.

An Agent Named Amoo Runs the Whole Show

Amoo talks like an ordinary chatbot. Unlike one, it works fully offline for its core functions and needs no constant network connection to get things done.

It also learns. Book a pet-friendly flight once, and Amoo will default to pet-friendly options the next time, or automatically pick your go-to restaurant when a reservation request comes in.

For travelers, the pitch gets specific. The Neo translates live conversations, text messages, phone calls and even text on signs, menus or museum posters across 32 supported languages, including regional dialects.

It also works when the signal does not. Offline, it can pull up transit schedules, surface nearby events or open a saved itinerary, and it will auto-fill customs forms, flag visa requirements and send check-in reminders based on a traveler’s flight details.

Underneath sits Step Edge. It is StepFun’s on-device model, built to run within a phone’s processing limits. Step Edge is part of a wider “1+N” model lineup StepFun has built since entering the foundation-model race in April 2023, and the Neo is the first shipping product where that model work, the company’s edge AI research and its actual hardware come together.

Step AOS, the operating system carrying all of this, also includes a voice-and-vision input layer StepFun calls NUI, designed to learn habits over time and shift control from tapping icons to simply saying what you want done. StepFun says its memory system can recall relevant details in as little as 15 milliseconds and ranks near the top of LongMemEval, a benchmark used to test AI memory recall.

Why StepFun Beat OpenAI to the Punch

Every major phone brand already has an AI story to tell. Apple has Apple Intelligence, Samsung has Galaxy AI, Google has Gemini, and all three sit on top of an operating system that predates them.

StepFun’s pitch is that the Neo was designed the other way round, model first, hardware second. Ice Universe, a Chinese tech commentator followed for device leaks, wrote that the launch was “marking the beginning of the Agentic AI smartphone era.”

OpenAI’s own rumored phone is not expected until around 2028. Apple, meanwhile, recently sued OpenAI, accusing it of stealing proprietary technology, circuit designs and component architecture meant for a slate of upcoming consumer AI devices, a dispute that leaves OpenAI’s hardware timeline murkier still.

StepFun is not exactly a garage operation, either. Huaqin Technology, one of the world’s largest device manufacturers, backed the company’s Series B+ funding round, and reports point to Longcheer Technology, OmniVision Integrated Circuits Group and ZTE as additional backers.

The stakes go beyond one phone. Gartner projects that 15% of work decisions made autonomously by 2028, will be handled by agentic AI, up from none in 2024.

Alipay, Ctrip and Didi Give the Agent Something to Do

An agent is only as useful as what it can plug into. StepFun lined up integration partners spanning payments, travel, ride-hailing, food delivery, office work and video editing, so Amoo can act across services instead of staying stuck inside its own app.

Alipay, which separately opened an agent platform for merchant orders, supplies the payment rail Amoo needs to actually check out of a booking rather than just suggest one.

Whether Amoo can actually finish a booking end to end is the test StepFun has now set for itself in public.

China Already Ran This Experiment Once

China has already run something close to this experiment, and it did not go smoothly. ByteDance and ZTE unveiled an agentic AI smartphone prototype, the Nubia M153 running ByteDance’s Doubao assistant, on December 2, 2025. It sold out within hours of launch.

Then came the backlash. Entrepreneur Taylor Ogan posted viral demos of the M153 completing tasks on its own, and the reaction turned quickly from novelty to alarm over how much control the agent actually had.

ByteDance said the phone did not store screen content or operation processes on its servers, and that such data would not be used to train future models. Even so, users remained wary of the privacy trade-off, and the company later scaled back the capabilities of Doubao, the agentic AI running on the device.

Is Step AOS New Software, or Just Android Underneath?

StepFun frames Step AOS as software built from the ground up for AI agents. GSMArena, reviewing the unveiling, was not convinced, noting that the company has offered little proof beyond a claim that the operating system pulls pieces from Android, Linux and RTOS, a real-time operating system.

“It’s not clear if Step AOS is actually anything more than a skin on top of Android,” GSMArena wrote in its assessment of the launch.

StepFun points to a few specifics to back its claim:

• Rebuilt core – Step AOS pulls its core from pieces of Android, Linux and RTOS, StepFun says, assembled into a single new layer built for agents.
• Atomic capability engine – splits the phone’s functions into communication, apps, files and system tools using the Model Context Protocol (MCP) standard, letting the agent combine them freely.
• Trusted execution environment – agent actions run in an isolated, auditable space, with permissions granted only when needed and revoked right after.
• One-tap undo – a mistake the agent makes can reportedly be reversed with a single tap.

The Chinese outlet Yicai Global has already flagged what can go wrong when this kind of access goes too far. It reported that the Nubia M153 used an Android system permission called INJECT_EVENTS, normally reserved for system components, to simulate screen taps and read displayed content, a detail that fed directly into the Doubao backlash and prompted WeChat and some banking apps to flash login warnings when Doubao was active.

StepFun’s answer to that history is a stack of its own credentials. The StepX Neo has passed the L3 level of China’s national AI terminal intelligence grading standard, the highest tier currently open for testing, and StepFun says it is the only phone holding that certificate so far. The company also co-published an agent security whitepaper with the Shanghai AI Laboratory.

The same mix of claim and caveat shows up in the hardware’s AI credentials. StepFun says Step Edge leads comparable on-device models across 29 benchmarks, but as GSMArena pointed out, “it hasn’t said which benchmarks those are and which models it’s comparing to.”

What Nobody Knows Yet About the StepX Neo

The Shanghai event was long on software philosophy and short on the details buyers actually ask about first.

What We Know

• StepFun unveiled the StepX Neo at a brand event in Shanghai on July 13.
• Confirmed launch partners include Alipay, Ctrip, Didi, Meituan, WPS, CapCut, Baidu, Amap and JD.com.
• The phone has passed the L3 tier of China’s national AI terminal grading standard and carries a rear secondary display plus a dual-camera setup.

What’s Unconfirmed

• Price, retail launch date and core hardware specs, including RAM, storage and battery capacity.
• Full camera specifications beyond the dual-lens setup shown on stage.
• Whether the StepX Neo will ever launch outside China.

GSMArena also flagged something smaller: the name StepX already belongs to an unrelated fitness platform, a mix-up that has nothing to do with whether the phone actually ships.

None of that answers when it ships or what it costs, the two questions every buyer actually has.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Step Amoo?

StepFun describes Amoo as having a “complete capability chain for perception, memory, decision-making, and action,” going beyond a traditional voice assistant. It lives inside Step AOS rather than as a separate downloadable app, and users trigger multi-step jobs by talking or typing to it directly.

Is the StepX Neo Really the World’s First Agentic Phone?

Not quite. ByteDance and ZTE’s Nubia M153, running ByteDance’s Doubao assistant, reached the market first, in December 2025, selling out before a privacy backlash forced ByteDance to pull back some features. StepFun’s claim rests on being the first mass-market phone with the agent built directly into the operating system, plus the L3 certification no rival currently holds. A regulatory angle looms too. Chinese officials were reportedly watching the Doubao phone in the wild before deciding on any intervention, and the StepX Neo will likely face the same scrutiny.

Does the StepX Neo Need an Internet Connection to Work?

Not for its core functions. Amoo works offline for tasks like visa reminders or customs help, and StepFun says it uses a “multi-brain” setup that dynamically switches between on-device and cloud models depending on how complex a request is, sending only the harder jobs out to the cloud.

When Can You Buy the StepX Neo, and What Will It Cost?

Neither is set yet. Industry watchers expect a China launch sometime next year aimed at the premium price segment, though StepFun has confirmed no date or number. For comparison, ByteDance’s Doubao phone went from prototype to sold-out preorders in a single day, then had capabilities pulled back within weeks, a timeline StepFun will want to avoid repeating.

Will the StepX Neo Launch Outside China?

That is unclear. Coverage of the unveiling notes that international availability, including in India, remains unconfirmed. A Chinese phone entering the United States or European Union also tends to face separate regulatory hurdles around data handling, which could slow any launch beyond China regardless of StepFun’s own plans.