YouTuber Marques Brownlee was critical of the Vertu Agent Q, a luxury mobile phone priced at over $5,000 USD. Despite housing a 24/7 AI ‘assistant,’ the feature failed to meet expectations.
“Do not buy this phone, and don’t fall for their website slop,” Brownlee wrote in the description of his January 10, 2026 upload. The video focused on an “Ultra Luxury” smartphone by Vertu.
For the technical components alone, MKBHD argued the phone could reasonably cost between $800-$1,000 USD. Far from it, in this case, however, as it ran him “$5,380 USD, plus tax, plus shipping.”
So why exactly is it so expensive? Well, beyond its design and premium materials, the main selling point is what Vertu claimed to be the “world’s first AI Agent” packed into a phone.
MKBHD critical of Vertu Agent Q’s AI Agent
Brownlee claimed to have tested the phone for a number of weeks and was happy to admit that some features were “better than a regular phone.”
The popular tech-based content creator praised the design itself along with some of the specs under the hood. However, he quickly grew concerned when online descriptions of the camera and its features failed to hold up under scrutiny.
As Virtu’s site tells us, “Time is the ultimate luxury,” so don’t spend yours paying for this phone.
But it all properly unraveled when he began testing the AI feature. A red button on the side of the phone can be pressed at any time to open an exclusive Vertu Life app. This app aims to accommodate your every request, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
It can help by booking a table at a fancy restaurant, or helping to plan a travel itinerary, for example. Brownlee first used it to order a t-shirt from his own website, and at first, it appeared to work without a hitch.
The AI bot asked for his shirt size and best shipping address, but then things got a little peculiar. First, Brownlee noticed the prices didn’t align. On his own website, his shirt is available for $29USD. The AI Agent only asked for $20.30 USD.
Then, the AI bot asked Brownlee to wait until 10AM Beijing time to place the order. Growing suspicious, the YouTuber asked directly if the AI bot was actually a human. “It’s real man,” was the response he got, grammatically incorrect to boot.
This led Brownlee down the Vertu rabbit hole, where he checked over their online shop and found phones for as much as $55,600 USD, and even a toothbrush for $370,000 USD.
The site “reads like AI slop,” he claimed. “Cramming as many buzzwords in as possible. [There are] just so many endless pages on their website with jumbles of words that don’t really mean anything.”
