Baidu Launches Token Exchange for Verified AI Model Services

Baidu launched Token Exchange, a marketplace for comparing and buying AI model services, at Baidu World 2026 on November 12, 2026, alongside upgrades across its models, agents, cloud and chips. The company reported that the exchange is averaging more than 50 million calls and over 700 billion tokens a day after one month.

Token Exchange gives businesses and individual users one place to compare prices and performance and then access services from multiple model providers. Its verification process compares model fingerprints and tests capability, performance and availability. Providers receive credit ratings based on regular spot checks and real-time, end-to-end call monitoring; Baidu says more than 100 model resources have been onboarded. The design combines initial verification with continuing oversight rather than treating a listing as a one-time check.

ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview and Application Models

The model updates included ERNIE 5.5 Flash Preview, which Baidu released on November 11, 2026, one day before Baidu World. It is the first post-trained model built on the earlier ERNIE 5.5 Flash Base, with 280 billion total parameters, 14 billion activated per token and a 1-million-token context window. Baidu positions it for coding, 3D modeling, knowledge work and content creation.

Baidu says the Preview balances capability with inference efficiency, citing competitive benchmark scores and fast decoding. Its demonstrations emphasize work inside an agent harness: in an 11-hour Unreal Engine task, the text-only model wrote a third-person game in C++ and converted playtest problems, including a hovering character and misplaced camera, into measurable software tests because it could not see the screen.

The API is available through Qianfan at RMB 1 per million input tokens and RMB 4 per million output tokens, with cached input at RMB 0.04 per million. Baidu plans to release the weights under Apache 2.0 by November 25, 2026, while cautioning that this intermediate post-training checkpoint may still fall short in some capabilities as training continues.

Two application-specific models accompanied it. ERNIE Wizshot Micro-Expression combines text, images and speech for expressive video creation. ERNIE Light Deep Thinking handles complex search requests and tool calls by pairing a fast-thinking model that serves users with a slow-thinking model that continuously refines it. Baidu says its Sparse Attention technology compresses historical memory during decoding, reducing inference costs without compromising performance.

Agent Upgrades and the Intelligent-Organization Strategy

Robin Li, Baidu’s co-founder and CEO, framed the portfolio around a shift from fixed hierarchies to organizations built around tasks. His three principles are to break down job boundaries, convert tacit knowledge into shared organizational assets, and create measurable closed-loop processes that support continuous learning. Baidu’s internal figures provide the adoption case: average daily active agents rose from 5,000 to 37,000 over the past year, while weekly completed tasks increased from 84,000 to more than 1 million.

DuMate is now the unified gateway to Baidu’s specialized agents, and its Harness engine and Agent API have been opened to developers. The DuMate team said it iterated more than 160 times in six months and used the agent to generate 90% of the team’s code. KOOKO, upgraded from GenFlow 3.0, combines public information, professional databases and users’ own content to produce research reports, slide decks and websites.

Famou 3.0 addresses production operations by combining an agent platform with forward-deployed engineering services, with Baidu reporting customers across 25 of China’s 41 industrial categories.

Cloud and Chips Support the Stack

Baidu AI Cloud launched the Tianchi 1024-card Supernode, an all-optical interconnect system built for high-speed data transmission. Kunlunxin, Baidu’s AI chip business, said its M100 inference chip has shipped, while the flagship M300 is expected in 2027 with improvements in computing power, memory and interconnection.

Together, the announcements connect Baidu’s silicon and cloud infrastructure to foundation models, workflow agents and a marketplace for model services. Token Exchange extends that stack beyond Baidu’s own products. The open question is whether its verification and credit ratings can turn early usage into a trusted channel for enterprises choosing among model providers.