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Eunice Xu

ByteDance, the owner of TikTok, has moved to tighten controls on its artificial intelligence-powered smartphone after several of China’s most widely used apps restricted its voice-operated functions.
The company said it had scaled back the capabilities of Doubao, the agentic AI that runs on the device.
In a statement issued on Friday, ByteDance said it would prevent the Nubia M153 AI phone from claiming incentives that were intended for active human users.
It was also disabling the assistant’s interaction with financial apps, including banking and payment services, and suspending AI features in competitive games to preserve fair play.
The measures followed moves by a number of leading platforms to limit Doubao’s operations, including Alipay, the payment app owned by Ant Group, an affiliate of Alibaba Group Holding, which also owns the South China Morning Post.
The handset, launched as a trial product, has attracted strong interest from early adopters by offering a way to control the device without touching the screen. Users can, for example, dictate verbal commands for the phone to publish social media posts automatically.
Chen Tang, a 21-year-old freelancer and Nubia M153 user, said that Pinduoduo, Alibaba’s Taobao and Alipay, and Ele.me could not be operated via Doubao, which was embedded in the phone’s operating system.
He said that although he could still log in to these apps manually, his accounts would be restricted once he used Doubao to control them.
“It has a global memory [a device-wide memory tracking activity], so it basically knows everything about you,” Tang said, adding that this was one reason he was not yet ready to replace his iPhone Pro Max entirely with the Doubao phone.

The Nubia M153, priced at 3,499 yuan (US$494), was released as a “technology preview version” on the ZTE website. The purchasing page warned that the device was intended for industry professionals only and that its functions might not be fully complete. ZTE jointly developed the phone with ByteDance.
Some users of the new agentic AI phone said on social media that their accounts were frozen after they tried to use Doubao’s voice assistant features on major apps.
Food delivery platform Meituan and ByteDance’s own short video app Douyin could still be controlled by Doubao without issue.
Previously, multiple users reported on social media that using AI assistant features with WeChat could cause the app to crash, block logins or even lead to account suspensions.
On Wednesday, ByteDance said it had disabled the AI assistant’s ability to control WeChat because of these login problems. The company added that it was working with developers to establish “clearer, more predictable rules” and to avoid “blanket restrictions that hinder users’ legitimate use of AI”.
ByteDance said the phone did not store screen content or operation processes on its servers, and that such data would not be used for model training. Even so, users like Tang remained concerned about privacy.


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ByteDance’s new AI smartphone has run into resistance, as major Chinese platforms move to block its features citing fairness and security


ByteDance’s new AI smartphone has run into resistance, as major Chinese platforms move to block its features citing fairness and security.


ByteDance’s agentic AI smartphone dials up a digital backlash from China’s top apps

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}ByteDance’s new AI smartphone has run into resistance, as major Chinese platforms move to block its features citing fairness and security

ByteDance’s new AI smartphone has run into resistance, as major Chinese platforms move to block its features citing fairness and security