Baidu token exchange draws 100+ suppliers, 1,000 clients in a day

On 14 November 2026, Baidu said its new AI model marketplace, called Ciyuansuo (词元所), received more than 100 supplier applications and connected more than 1,000 new customers on its first day. According to Leiphone, which relayed information supplied by the company, the platform was launched on 12 November at Baidu World 2026. Founder Robin Li (Li Yanhong) called it an “exchange for large models”.

What is Baidu’s token exchange?

A token is the unit of text an AI model reads or writes, and the unit providers bill for; buying tokens means buying model capacity. According to Leiphone, Ciyuansuo gathers models and their providers on one side and businesses and individuals on the other, so users can find, buy and use tokens from models deemed trustworthy. 36Kr describes it as a matchmaking and trading platform offering model selection, calling, trading and management.

According to Leiphone, the platform rests on two functions: verifying authenticity and rating credit. Before joining, a model must pass admission checks: model-fingerprint comparison, capability tests, and performance and availability tests. After going live it faces periodic spot-check probes and real-time monitoring across the whole call chain. The results feed each supplier’s credit rating. 36Kr adds that supplier evaluation also relies on blockchain record-keeping.

What happened on the first day?

• More than 100 new suppliers applied to join, according to Baidu as cited by Leiphone on 14 November.
• More than 1,000 new customers connected the same day, according to the same source.
• During the trial period, more than 100 supplier resources were already registered and calls exceeded 50 million per day, according to Leiphone.
• The platform lists more than 40 models (42 according to 36Kr), including DeepSeek, Kimi, Zhipu’s GLM, MiniMax, video models and Baidu’s own Ernie family.

Registrants include both model makers and third-party inference providers, meaning companies that run a model on their own servers and sell access. According to 36Kr, a developer connects one API and can switch providers freely, comparing price, time to first token, throughput, 7-day success rate and call volume. For the model DeepSeek-v4.1-flash, 36Kr counts six providers with different prices and performance, with the relative saving displayed. Providers can expose access through OpenAI’s protocol as well as Anthropic’s.

36Kr also cites figures from a screenshot of the platform’s ranking page, taken before the official launch: over 7 days, 398 million calls, about 5.13 trillion tokens, 68 ranked resources and an average 290 milliseconds to first token. DeepSeek-v4.1-flash ranked first for both calls and token volume. These numbers come from a screenshot relayed by a media outlet, not from a Baidu release.

Why is Baidu opening this market?

According to Leiphone, Robin Li noted that over the first nine months of the year more than one new model was released almost every day, and that demand for calls grew in step. He criticised the market’s “token relay stations” for taking no responsibility for model quality, service stability or speed, and for making it impossible even to verify that the model sold is the right one. The exchange aims to close that trust gap.

Pan Helin, a member of the Information and Communication Economy Expert Committee of China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, quoted by Leiphone, argues that the core problem of Chinese computing power is a structural mismatch: occasional surplus of general-purpose compute, lasting shortage of high-end AI compute, and small data centres that have resources but cannot reach customers. In his view, the platform gives that idle stock an outlet that can be searched and compared.

According to 36Kr’s analysis, China’s market for model access through APIs (“MaaS”, model-as-a-service) is entering a phase of multi-model aggregation: Alibaba Bailian, ByteDance’s Volcano Ark and the Alibaba-linked JellyToken are already positioned. By placing Ernie next to DeepSeek, GLM and Kimi, Baidu hopes to reach developers and small firms that would not buy its cloud on its own, and to build platform revenue. 36Kr also sees it as a way to stop customers being intercepted by rival aggregators.

The difficulties are real, 36Kr notes: connecting many providers with heterogeneous interfaces, aligning billing units, running constant probes, protecting third parties without putting Ernie at a disadvantage in price comparisons, and keeping evaluation neutral. Data drift or a supplier outage would directly damage developers’ trust. It remains uncertain that the platform can keep these promises at scale: the day-one figures are Baidu statements and have not been independently verified.

What this changes for a business in China

For a Chinese company building AI agents or applications, the marketplace promises one API to integrate and the ability to choose among providers of the same model on measured price and latency rather than a sales brochure. It also offers a public indicator, the credit rating, for avoiding opaque resellers. For a mid-sized compute or inference provider, it is an extra sales channel. Before committing volumes, it remains to check contract terms, actual pricing and whether the advertised performance holds. Companies outside China following this market will mainly read it as a sign of how token pricing is becoming a comparable commodity.