ByteDance's Volcano Engine unveiled the Doubao 2.1 Pro flagship at its FORCE Conference, with daily token calls across the Doubao family now reaching 180 trillion, per Pandaily. Volcano Engine President Tan Dai said the total cost of running Doubao 2.1 Pro is about 20% of Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.6, achieved through quantization, distillationDistillationTraining a smaller or cheaper model on the outputs of a larger one so it inherits much of the larger model's ability. It is a standard technique, but it has become a trade dispute because it lets a lab reproduce a rival's capabilities without matching its compute spend. and proprietary chip development. ByteDance also rolled out a paid Doubao Pro consumer subscription starting at 68 yuan (about $10) a month with a new office task mode, the first major monetization push for what QuestMobile ranks as China's most used consumer AI app. Tan Dai attributed the cost advantage to in-house silicon, a structural response that has become central to Chinese model vendors' positioning as Commerce Department export controls continue to restrict their access to top tier U.S. AI accelerators.
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Tencent has launched Agently Mail, a dedicated email service that gives AI agentsAI agentAn AI system that carries out multi-step tasks on its own, such as browsing, writing code or making purchases, rather than answering a single prompt. Agents raise new questions about liability, security and oversight because they act rather than just advise. their own digital identities isolated from users' personal QQ Mail accounts, per Pandaily. Agents can register independently, receive verification codes, and conduct business-to-business workflows including inquiries, quotations, order placement and invoice reconciliation on their own behalf. Registration requires real-name authentication and the platform supports integration with ByteDance's Doubao, Moonshot AI's Kimi Work, Anthropic's Claude Code and other domestic and foreign agent systems. The isolation, real-name and audit-logging design extends the Cyberspace Administration of China's online traceability requirements down to the agent identity layer, an industry-led answer to a governance question that no current Chinese rule directly addresses.
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Momenta, the assisted-driving software company that supplies systems to nine of the world's 10 largest carmakers, cleared its Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing hearing on June 23 and is targeting roughly $1 billion in proceeds at a valuation near $14.8 billion, per QbitAI. The company has repositioned from autonomous driving to "physical AI," a category built on world models that generate predictions and plans for action in physical environments. Momenta's R7 world model entered mass production in April on SAIC-Volkswagen's ID. ERA 9X, drawing on driving data from a fleet that has logged more than 12 billion kilometers. A successful listing would make Momenta the first Hong Kong-listed pure-play physical AI stock and channel mainland capital into the world model and embodied AI infrastructure that Beijing has flagged as strategic for the next phase of AI competition.
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