China's AI Giants Are Literally Paying Users to Switch

$650 million in cash and prizes. That's what China's AI giants are spending this Lunar New Year to buy your attention.

ByteDance is giving away luxury cars. Baidu allocated $72 million for its Ernie chatbot promotion. Tencent doubled that at $145 million for Yuanbao. Alibaba went nuclear with $434 million to push Qwen. The giveaways were so popular that Alibaba had to "urgently add resources" when its app crashed from user overload.

This isn't holiday generosity. This is survival.

The Last Stand for AI Dominance

China's AI companies are in a winner-take-all battle, and they know it. The window to capture users before rivals "lock in market dominance" is closing fast, according to Forrester's Charlie Dai.

The stakes couldn't be higher. ByteDance's new Seedance 2.0 model just went viral with an AI-generated video of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting that turned heads in Hollywood. Elon Musk himself commented "It's happening fast" when he saw the release.

Zhipu AI rolled out GLM-5 to compete with Anthropic's Claude. MiniMax released M2.5 for public testing. DeepSeek and Alibaba are expected to announce next-gen models during the holidays.

But here's the uncomfortable truth: "Profitability and sustainable business models remain unclear for every major player in the global market," Dai told CNBC.

The Familiar Playbook

This cash-burning strategy should ring alarm bells for anyone who remembers China's playbook in steel, solar panels, and EVs. Beijing-backed companies flooded global markets with artificially cheap products, eventually triggering trade wars and tariffs.

The government is already joining the AI push. Premier Li Qiang called for "large-scale commercial application" of AI and stronger coordination of data, computing, and internet resources. It's the same state-led approach that worked before—until it didn't.

Tencent's 2015 Lunar New Year promotion created explosive growth for WeChat, now China's dominant messaging app. But that was different. WeChat solved real problems. Today's AI models are still searching for their killer use case.

The American Perspective

For US tech companies and investors, China's AI spending spree presents both opportunity and threat. The aggressive subsidization could accelerate AI development globally, but it also creates unfair competition.

OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft don't have Beijing's backing for billion-dollar user acquisition campaigns. They're competing on merit and market dynamics, not state subsidies.

The irony? While Chinese companies burn cash to attract users, Anthropic just got an 11% user boost from a single Super Bowl ad that simply highlighted its advantages over OpenAI. Sometimes, product differentiation beats cash giveaways.