ByteDance unveils China’s most affordable AI coding agent at just US$1.30 a month

Volcano Engine, the cloud unit of TikTok owner ByteDance, has launched a new coding agent priced at just 9.9 yuan (US$1.30) for the first month of subscription – underscoring the fierce competition in China’s booming AI developer tools market.

The Doubao-Seed-Code model, released on Tuesday, carries a standard monthly fee of 40 yuan, according to a company statement. The company unveiled its discounted one-month promotion on November 11, China’s annual Singles’ Day shopping festival.

ByteDance has been accelerating its artificial intelligence push, with usage of its Doubao chatbot doubling in the past six months, Volcano Engine president Tan Dai said at a corporate event in October.

The growth, he added, highlighted the rapid rise in AI adoption among Chinese consumers and reinforced ByteDance’s position among the world’s leading AI players.

The new model set a state-of-the-art record on the SWE-Bench Verified test, placing it on par with mainstream systems such as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet.

The launch comes after Anthropic, a US AI start-up, updated its service restrictions in September to block access by subsidiaries of Chinese firms – the latest sign of growing polarisation in the global AI landscape.

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