OPPO announced on October 13 in Shenzhen that it is partnering with the AI agent platform Manus, wiring Manus's agent capabilities into its own assistant, AI Mind Pilot, as a new "agent mode." The first device will be the upcoming Find X10 series running ColorOS 17. OPPO says the launch date, the markets covered and whether users will pay extra will be revealed at the launch event.
According to the official description, AI Mind Pilot's agent mode first works out the end result a user wants, breaks it into steps, looks up information and picks tools, then hands back a finished product that can be used right away. It can also work directly on files and photos stored on the phone.
Two examples from the announcement
The first is trip planning. Flights, hotels, restaurant bookings and attraction tickets tend to be scattered across different apps; the agent pulls them together and combines them with information from the web to build a day-by-day itinerary. The second covers creative and office work: finding and organizing travel photos, or blending local files with web material into a slide deck, a proposal or a portfolio.
Kai Tang, OPPO's president of software engineering, said in the announcement:
"Agentic AI marks an important shift from answering questions to helping users get things done."
Manus co-founder and chief product officer Zhang Tao (Tao Zhang) kept his comment focused on the handset itself: smartphones sit at the center of daily life and carry a large share of the tasks people deal with every day.
How data is split between device and cloud
Privacy is the most detailed part of the announcement. ColorOS 17 uses an on-device model to understand and organize information locally. For local tasks such as finding, sorting and renaming files and photos, the original content stays on the phone and is not shared with Manus. When a task needs external processing, AI Mind Pilot asks for the user's explicit confirmation before any related content is uploaded or shared. Users can set which information the agent may access, which actions it may perform, and whether external processing is allowed at all.
This "local first, ask before going to the cloud" split sidesteps the most unsettling thing about phone agents: an assistant that can operate across apps can see too much by default. What the announcement does not say is whether "explicit confirmation" means a prompt every time or a single grant that stays valid over the long term.
What it means for users in China
Manus's status has shifted several times this year. At the end of last year Meta announced it would acquire Manus, reportedly for around $2 billion. In April, China's National Development and Reform Commission issued a notice barring foreign investment in Manus and requiring the deal to be unwound. In July, reports said Tencent, together with original investors including Zhenfund, was preparing to buy the stake back from Meta. The partnership announcement says nothing about how that buyback ended up.
The more immediate question is about the product. According to public reports from last year, Manus moved its headquarters to Singapore and shut down its services for mainland China. OPPO's English press release and Manus's Chinese-language blog post went out at the same time, but neither distinguishes between a China edition and an overseas edition. If the agent mode on the China-market Find X10 swaps in a model from a domestic partner, mainland users would get a feature with the same name but a different engine. That cannot be verified from the public material at present.
Domestic makers already offer a reference point on this front. In mid-September, ByteDance's consumer version of the Doubao phone assistant debuted on the Nubia NaviX Ultra, alongside a screen-automation declaration protocol that lets third-party apps declare that they refuse to be operated by AI on a user's behalf. OPPO did not mention any comparable mechanism this time. When its agent goes into other companies' apps to fetch flight and hotel orders, whether those apps agree and how the data is obtained will have to wait for the launch event.
Sources: OPPO official press release, Manus official blog, CocoLoop, China's National Development and Reform Commission notice. The Manus acquisition and buyback developments follow public reporting; details on the Doubao phone assistant are based on materials released by ByteDance.