Ant Group Upgrades GPASS to Lingying, Building Agent Infrastructure for AI Terminals

The announcement was made at the "AI Drives New Terminals and New Services" forum. Zhou Zhifeng, senior vice president of Ant Group, said AI terminals are changing human-machine relations, with devices shifting from waiting for user operation to understanding intent and coordinating services. "Ant does not make hardware, but we are willing to be the one who 'paves the road,'" Zhou said. "We hope to turn identity, security, payment and device-cloud collaboration capabilities into infrastructure, so that manufacturers and developers can focus more on product and scenario innovation."

According to the report, AI terminals are moving from devices to service entrances. Previously terminals presented information, and users operated them through screens, keyboards and touch. AI allows devices to understand what users see, say and the environment they are in, and to call agents and services to complete tasks. AI glasses, earphones and smart rings are carriers of this shift. Interaction is moving to voice, vision, gestures and eye movement, while competition shifts from capturing attention to understanding intent, connecting digital services and completing real-world tasks.

Ant's earlier vision dates to 2017, when Alipay's "Like a Shadow Plan" imagined services free from phone constraints: a user could look and say something, and a service would happen. Last year at the Bund Summit, Ant released GPASS. Over the past year, the team and terminal partners explored glasses payment, city companion tours, shared biking and parking payment. Problems emerged, including repeated chip and system adaptation, difficulty in uniformly calling hardware capabilities, service ecosystem fragmentation, and identity and authorization risks in agent execution. The upgrade means Ant wants to move from application and service connection down to the agent runtime foundation.

Lingying builds an agent runtime framework covering interaction, orchestration, policy, execution, tools and memory, and connects to phones, AI glasses, earphones and other multimodal terminals. Users can express needs through natural language and multimodal methods; the system understands context and coordinates devices, agents and services within explicit authorization. For developers, Lingying abstracts hardware capabilities such as photography, display, sensors and temple interaction, reducing repeated adaptation.

The report said AI models give machines intelligence and agents give them action, but AI terminals must bring that action into the real world. This creates two infrastructure tasks: trust for agents entering commerce, involving identity, authorization and trusted behavior, and connection for agents entering the physical world, involving how agents understand terminals, call devices and connect services. Lingying aims to be infrastructure connecting agents with terminals and terminals with services.

Security is built into the operating chain. The system verifies trusted identity from device access, isolates sensitive data locally and establishes trusted links for cross-device connections. When an agent calls tools or executes tasks, the system authenticates and authorizes it, and operations can be traced. Ant also worked with the Terminal Laboratory of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology to promote an evaluation laboratory and security standards. Zhou said the industry needs not another closed system but a road more partners can join. Future work includes multi-chip adaptation, opening terminal capabilities and building a developer ecosystem.

Lingying will connect chip partners, terminal manufacturers and developers through an open platform. For hardware manufacturers, a unified capability access layer can reduce adaptation and development costs. For developers, it provides process orchestration, interface components, hardware plug-ins and application publishing tools, supporting reuse across terminals. For users, lightweight applications can be invoked by scenario and used without complex operations on small or screenless devices. At the launch, Lingying showed reference design prototypes and partner public-version solutions, exploring binocular full-color, iris eye tracking and various chip architectures. During the Bund Summit, related capabilities will enter Yuyuan Mall and BFC Bund Finance Center, where users can experience city companion tours through AI glasses.

From GPASS to Lingying, Ant is not creating another hardware brand but turning identity, security, payment, agent and device-cloud collaboration capabilities into open infrastructure. Like APASS, which establishes commercial trust for agents, Lingying focuses on connecting agents to real terminals and services. One addresses trust, the other connection; together they form infrastructure for agents to move from the digital world into real commerce and daily life.