A new report from the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) shows that domestic AI token service prices have nearly doubled compared to the second half of 2025, while usage has tripled.
In June 2026, average daily AI token usage reached approximately 500 trillion, nearly 4 times that of December 2025,reflecting a sharp surge in AI application demand.
The average AI model service price in China increased from 6.8 yuan to 13.46 yuan based on CAICT’s standardized pricing baseline.
Meanwhile, international model prices launched since 2026 averaged 117.8 yuan, about 8.7 times higher than domestic prices.
CAICT noted that the AI model service market is transitioning into a phase of simultaneous price and volume growth,supported by the development of Model as a Service (MaaS) providers.
On October 24, Moonshot AI introduced Kimi K3.1 Pro with 3 trillion parameters and a 1-million-token context window, achieving 65.7% on Terminal-Bench 4.0.
According to disclosed information, Kimi K3.1 Pro’s cost is about 1/5 of GPT-6 Astra and 1/2 of Claude Opus 5.5.
ByteDance is piloting its Seedance 2.5 4K video generation model across 20 film studios and directors, aiming for commercial application.
In the automotive industry, an AI pilot facility announced a computing infrastructure of 112.7 EFLOPS and deployed 6 AI agents dedicated to design, manufacturing, quality control, and autonomous driving.
📌 Conclusion: The Chinese AI market is shifting from low-price competition to competition based on quality and application value. Token prices have risen by nearly 100%, yet usage has still tripled, indicating sufficient demand to absorb higher price levels. Nevertheless, domestic service prices remain about 8.7 times lower than international levels.This trend reflects the increasingly profound commercialization of AI within enterprises.
