Chinese AI models are coming to Samsung flagship phones

Samsung’s next flagship phones will ship with on-device AI models from a Beijing startup called Facebile Intelligence. That makes this one of the more concrete cross-border AI deals between a Chinese AI company and a global phone maker.

The collaboration came to light alongside a broader regulatory development. China’s Cyberspace Administration published a list of seven on-device generative AI services that have completed government registration: Apple Intelligence, Huawei’s Xiaoyi, OPPO’s AndesGPT, vivo’s BlueMind, Xiaomi’s HyperAI, Samsung’s Galaxy AI, and Nubia’s Doubao. Registration is a prerequisite for deploying AI services on devices sold in China.

Sources told Chinese tech media that Samsung has partnered with Facebile Intelligence to integrate its MiniCPM series of on-device models. The models will run on several flagship devices — Samsung hasn’t specified which ones or which markets will get them first.

Facebile Intelligence was founded in Beijing in August 2022, incubated out of Tsinghua University’s Natural Language Processing lab. The founding team carries serious credentials. CEO Li Dahai was a partner and CTO at Zhihu, China’s answer to Quora. Chief Scientist Liu Zhiyuan is a professor in Tsinghua’s computer science department. CTO Zeng Guoyang was the core engineering lead who trained CPM-1 — China’s first large language model — when he was just 22 years old.

The company’s growth has been rapid. In the first half of 2026, Facebile raised over 5 billion yuan (about $690 million) in cumulative funding, pushing its valuation past 20 billion yuan. That makes it the most valuable unicorn in China’s on-device AI space.

The Samsung deal isn’t happening in isolation. On the same day, Alibaba confirmed that its Qwen model will be integrated into Apple Intelligence for devices sold in China, covering iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS. Users won’t need to switch apps to access Qwen’s text and image understanding capabilities.

Samsung and Apple are now shipping Chinese AI models on their phones. That’s not a future trend — it’s happening this year.