Honor, the phone brand that was formerly owned by Huawei, is teaming up with DeepSeek to provide users with advanced AI capabilities.

Huawei sold Honor in late 2020 after U.S. sanctions against the company made it almost impossible to continue to effectively in the smartphone market. As part of the sanctions against some Chinese smartphone makers, Google is prohibited from providing its software and services to such companies, including its Gemini AI.

According to AndroidCentral, Honor has found a solution, tapping DeepSeek to power its smartphone AI assistant, YOYO. The move is a natural development, given that DeepSeek is both China-based and open source. What’s more, the fledgling AI service is challenging established leaders, such as OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

Honor’s decision, as well as DeepSeek’s emergence, continue to raise questions about China’s ability to compete in the AI space, as well as the effectiveness of U.S. efforts to stifle that competition.