What is the Honor Alpha Plan? Bold new AI vision explained

What is the Honor Alpha Plan? Phone maker has a bold vision for AI’s potential to alter civilisation and wants the tech world on board.

Honor chose its MWC 2025 announcements to unveil its vision of a collaborative AI future where key players unite to address the challenges and maximise the opportunities arising from the new technology.

Honor makes some of the best smartphones around, but the new Honor Alpha Plan will see the company transitioning from a regular smartphone maker to an “AI device ecosystem company”.

It has a three-step plan across the imminent agentic AI era where AI models can act on the users’ behalf without much prompting, then the physical era (think robots with AI capabilities) and then the big artificial general intelligence era that could transform society as we know it.

Honor is encouraging deep collaboration from major players across the industry to meet these goals. Here’s what the company is proposing at MWC 2025.

What does the Honor Alpha plan involve?

The Chinese company wants to partner up with other major tech players to “co-create an open, value-sharing ecosystem that maximises human potential, ultimately benefiting all mankind.”

The three-pronged plan spans the forthcoming eras of AI development.

The first step begins with the development of an intelligent phone. HONOR will work with partners to open technology boundaries to co-create a new paradigm for AI devices in the agentic AI era. Next, HONOR will open industry boundaries and co-create a new paradigm for AI ecosystem in the physical AI era. Finally, in the AGI era, HONOR will open human potential boundaries and co-create a new paradigm for civilisation.

Honor

The goals are lofty and far-reaching with the company going as far as saying the plan is to eventually usher in a new paradigm for civilisation itself when the artificial general intelligence (AI surpassing human intelligence) era eventually rocks around.

“In the end, we will open human potential boundaries, and co-create a new paradigm for civilisation in the AGI era. You will witness the co-existence between carbon-based life and silicon-based intelligence,” says Honor CEO James Li. “This is why all of us need to work together to maximise human potential to embrace an intelligent world.”

Agentic AI and AiMAGE

There’s a while to go before those eventualities. In the short term there’s plenty for device owners to look forward to. The company says it is already co-creating a “new paradigm for AI devices in the agentic AI era” with the likes of Google Cloud and Qualcomm.

At MWC 2025, Honor demonstrated how an AI agent can help users reserve a restaurant table through a third-party service that doesn’t clash with other calendar appointments and is achievable to reach given traffic conditions. That’ll be available on Honor devices internationally in the near future, the company says.

The company is also debuting a new image processing technology it is calling AiMAGE, which combines on-device and cloud-based tech. Locally, users can get a 50% uplift in image clarify from a 1.3 billion parameter model. However, taking it to the cloud offers a 12.4 billion parameter model that should see a big uptick in image clarity for content shot using the telephoto lens.

Furthermore, there’ll be a new AI Upscale feature for restoring older photographs. This and other AiMAGE features will be available on the Honor Magic 7 which runs on the Snapdragon 8 Elite processors.