Honor and Alibaba formalize an Agentic OS alliance for AI native devices
At a WAIC sub-forum on Saturday, the phone maker and the model giant tied Qwen into an operating system meant to read intent and run tasks across devices, with the Robot Phone shipping this year.
- Honor and Alibaba formalized an Agentic OS partnership at Honor's WAIC sub-forum in Shanghai on Saturday, July 18.
- Alibaba's Qwen model family gets integrated into Honor devices so on-device agents can complete complex tasks with minimal user input.
- Honor told AFP its Robot Phone, the foldable with a robotic gimbal arm shown at MWC in March, ships later this year with an embedded agent co-developed with Alibaba.
The agent-first phone now has an operating system with two heavyweight parents. Honor and Alibaba used the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai to formalize a partnership around Honor's Agentic OS, a next-generation operating system for AI powered devices, announced at Honor's sub-forum on Saturday, July 18, per the South China Morning Post. The system is designed to read user intent through voice, gaze, and movement, and to coordinate work across multiple devices and agents.
Under the deal, Alibaba's Qwen family, which the company calls the most downloaded open source model line in the world, is integrated into Honor devices so agents can complete complex tasks with minimal input. Honor told AFP that an agent using several AI models, some co-developed with Alibaba, will be embedded in its Robot Phone, the foldable with a robotic gimbal arm first shown at MWC Barcelona in March, when it goes on sale later this year.
A stage with unusual range
Saturday's sub-forum, titled "From digital screens to embodied intelligence," drew Honor CEO Li Jian and Xu Zhuhong, who heads multimodal interaction at Alibaba's Token Foundry, alongside Wired founding editor Kevin Kelly and Qualcomm China R&D head Xu Hao. The guest list is the tell: this is a hardware company and a model company jointly claiming the interface layer.
Why the timing matters
The announcement lands days before Samsung's Galaxy Z8 launch on July 22, and in the same window as ZTE selling out the first run of its agentic NaviX Ultra. Alibaba, meanwhile, is spending 380 billion yuan, about $53 billion, on AI infrastructure over three years, and just previewed its largest model ever. For Alibaba the phone deal is distribution for Qwen; for Honor it is a model stack it does not have to build. The agent OS race that Western platforms have approached through browsers and assistants is being fought in China at the firmware level.