Phones Become AI Training Microphones

Smartphones are ceasing to be primarily physical products and are becoming the main channels through which large AI models collect behavioural and sensor data. That makes phone makers less central than the companies that aggregate and train models on this data, shifting market power and turning everyday devices into opaque data‑harvesting infrastructure. — If phones function principally as data capture layers for closed AI models, regulators and competition policy must pivot from device markets to data‑and‑model governance to protect privacy, contestability, and civic oversight.