Baidu has launched a high‑stakes promotional campaign for its Wenxin AI assistant, offering users a share of RMB 500 million in cash “red envelopes” between January 26 and March 12, with individual prizes of up to RMB 10,000. The giveaway is distributed through the Baidu app and is timed to coincide with the peak Chinese New Year travel and family‑gifting season, when digital platforms traditionally compete aggressively for user attention.
The campaign doubles as a marketing play to accelerate adoption of Wenxin and to keep Baidu competitive in a market where rivals have also used cash incentives and festive promotions to grow engagement. Baidu has additionally secured a partnership role as the chief AI partner for the 2026 Beijing Radio and Television Spring Festival Gala, a high‑visibility tie‑in that will put its technology in front of tens of millions of viewers at a culturally significant moment.
This promotion is part of a broader pattern: China’s major tech platforms have increasingly blended entertainment, national festivals and AI marketing to expand user bases rapidly. Tencent, for example, earlier announced a RMB 1 billion cash distribution for the holiday season, signalling that deep pockets and mass giveaways are now an established tactic for platform competition in China’s consumer AI market.
Beyond short‑term engagement metrics, the campaign reveals Baidu’s strategic priorities. Cash incentives buy attention quickly, but the longer game is to fold users into Baidu’s ecosystem—collecting interaction data for model improvement, increasing daily active users of the Baidu app and creating monetisation paths for AI services. The Spring Festival Gala partnership also signals a bid for mainstream legitimacy and closer alignment with state media channels, which can blunt regulatory pushback and amplify reach.
The approach carries risks. Heavy subsidies strain unit economics if users do not convert into paying customers or long‑term users, and large‑scale promotions raise questions about data privacy and the terms under which interactions with AI assistants are recorded and reused. Regulators in China have grown attentive to platform conduct, consumer protection and the societal effects of AI, so a flamboyant public campaign is likely to attract both public interest and official scrutiny.
For international observers, the episode is a clear indicator of how China’s big tech firms are treating generative AI: as both a product and a battlefield for market share and legitimacy. The coming months will show whether such spending converts into structural advantages for Baidu’s Wenxin or simply escalates a seasonal arms race in which scale, not profitability, decides winners.