At the 2026 Inclusion Bund Conference on September 11, Ant Group announced the official upgrade of its GPASS trusted connectivity framework for smart terminals to Lingying. This platform is positioned as an Agent-native operating system and open ecosystem designed for new devices, providing foundational capabilities in natural interaction, agent deployment, multi-device synchronization, and trusted security. It is now available to chip partners, hardware manufacturers, and developers.

Zhou Zhifeng, Senior Vice President of Ant Group, highlighted that AI terminals are reshaping the human-device relationship, with devices progressing from waiting for user commands to understanding user intent and collaborating on services. "Ant doesn't build hardware, but we're willing to be the one paving the road. We want to solidify identity, security, payment, and device-cloud coordination as core infrastructure, enabling manufacturers and developers to focus on product and scenario innovation."

Traditionally, the terminal's primary function was to present information, requiring users to actively operate through screens, keyboards, or touch. AI is transforming this dynamic: devices are now beginning to understand what users see, hear, and experience, and are taking the initiative to invoke agents and services to complete tasks. Emerging hardware like AI glasses, earbuds, and smart rings is becoming a key vehicle for this change, shifting the interaction frontier from keyboards and touchscreens to voice, vision, gestures, and eye tracking. The competitive battleground is moving from capturing user attention to interpreting intent, linking digital services, and executing real-world tasks—signaling that AI terminal competitions extend beyond hardware specs to require robust software and service infrastructure.

Last year at the Bund Conference, Ant Group first introduced GPASS. Over the past year, the team has collaborated with various terminal partners to explore services such as glasses-based payments, urban touring guides, shared bike rides, and parking fee settlement. During these initiatives, challenges emerged, including redundant chip and system adaptations, inconsistent hardware capability utilization, fragmented service ecosystems, and identity and authorization risks during agent execution. Upgrading GPASS to Lingying signifies Ant Group's move to deepen its position from merely connecting applications and services to establishing the foundational agent runtime for AI terminals.

According to reports, Lingying constructs an agent operating framework that spans interaction, orchestration, strategy, execution, tools, and memory, while connecting downstream to phones, AI glasses, earbuds, and other multimodal devices. Users can express needs through natural language and multimodal inputs, with the system interpreting intent based on context and coordinating devices, agents, and services to finish tasks within clear authorization boundaries. For developers, Lingying abstracts hardware functions such as camera capture, display, sensors, and temple interactions into a unified API, minimizing repeated adaptation across different chips, systems, and devices, allowing them to prioritize application and service development.

Security is also embedded within Lingying's operational workflow. The system validates trusted identities at the point of device connection, isolates sensitive data locally, and establishes secure links for cross-device communications. When agents invoke tools or execute tasks, the system enforces identity verification and authorization, with all operations being traceable. Furthermore, Ant Group is collaborating with the Tele Terminal Lab of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology to advance evaluation lab construction and security standard setting, offering technical testing and standardization to support safe and reliable interactions across AI terminals.