ByteDance’s Doubao phone assistant has stopped operating banking, trust, payment, internet finance and lending apps, after 155 apps including Alipay, WeChat and several bank apps declared that they did not want the AI agent reading their screens and tapping through them for users.
The financial-app restriction appeared on October 21 in the weekly update to the refusal list under Doubao’s Screen Automation Execution Protocol (SAEP), which covers the Nubia M153 and Nubia NaviX Ultra handsets. Users can still use the affected apps by hand, but the agent can no longer read their screens or simulate taps, so it cannot see account details or move money. The October 14 list, published when a 30-day notice period ended, named 66 apps from Tencent and its affiliates and 23 from Alibaba and its affiliates, plus apps from China Merchants Bank, ICBC (Asia) and Chongqing Rural Commercial Bank.
Chinese banks keep a human sign-off on any step that moves funds or changes an account, including transfers, credit approval and anti-money-laundering calls, a technology manager at a joint-stock bank told 21st Century Business Herald. In August the Payment & Clearing Association of China issued a self-regulatory convention on agent payments that asks members to add know-your-agent (KYA) checks to KYC. JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Bank of America and Charles Schwab have also restricted outside AI agents from logging in to customer accounts.
Why it matters: Banks and wallets are drawing the line between an agent that starts a capped payment with a controlled token and an agent that takes over the account with the customer’s login. Only the first is on offer in China, which keeps customer data and liability with the app owners. A phone maker’s agent such as Doubao will get access to money only once the KYA rules and a clear split of responsibility for losses are settled.
Source: 21世纪经济报道 21st Century Business Herald, October 24, 2026; 澎湃新闻 The Paper, October 21, 2026 (Chinese-language sources, translated)
Image: N509FZ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
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