Alibaba Group Holding slashes charges for its Qwen3-Max AI model by up to 50%, sparking speculation of a price war in China’s competitive AI market. The company reduced prices on its cloud services platform for domestic users, with the minimum price falling to US$0.459 per million input tokens.

Moonshot AI’s Qwen3-Max model recently won a high-profile cryptocurrency investment competition, outperforming models from US and Chinese competitors. The pricing strategy reflects fierce competition in China’s AI market, with start-ups like Moonshot AI, Zhipu AI, and MiniMax touting industry-leading performance and cost efficiency.

Alibaba-backed Moonshot AI introduces a new pricing campaign, allowing new subscribers to pay as little as 0.99 yuan in the first month of use. Users can negotiate discounts through interactions with Moonshot AI’s chatbot, leading to some users sharing tips on social media about how to maximize discounts.

Volcano Engine, the cloud unit of ByteDance, launched a new coding agent priced at just 9.90 yuan (US$1.30) for the first month. This move aligns with recent sales techniques by Chinese AI firms to stand out in a crowded market. Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud services unit of Hangzhou-based Alibaba, owner of the South China Morning Post.

Read more at Yahoo Finance: Alibaba slashes Qwen3-Max model charges up to 50% as China’s AI price war rages on