Baidu CEO Robin Li unveiled Token Exchange at Baidu World 2026 in Beijing on 12 November. A Baidu press release and Pandaily, which drew on reports from the Chinese outlets IT Home and Yicai, covered the launch.

Baidu promises to check which model responds

Token Exchange works like an exchange: customers use models from several suppliers through a single API. Pandaily reported that Li justified the service by pointing to the many services that have sprung up to resell tokens. Buyers cannot always verify which model is actually responding, Li said.

Baidu says it tests every model on offer before listing it. It compares the model’s fingerprint, an identifier that distinguishes one model from another. It also measures capability, performance and availability, and later carries out spot checks. Suppliers receive a credit rating, and users get a warning if a rating falls. Baidu has not disclosed how the fingerprinting works or how it calculates the ratings.

Baidu says the API supports the OpenAI and Anthropic protocols. Several suppliers can offer the same model, and the service shows each one’s price, first-token latency, throughput and seven-day success rate.

The press release says that after one month the service has more than 100 model resources and handles a daily average of more than 50 million calls and more than 700 billion tokens. The service’s product page gives more than 70 resources, more than 60 million calls and more than 200 billion tokens a day. The figures have not been independently verified.

A reasoning model built for search

Baidu added ERNIE Lightning, which the press release calls ERNIE Light Deep Thinking, to its Qianfan cloud platform. Baidu originally built the model for its search engine to handle complex queries and tool calls quickly. A fast model serves users, while a slower reasoning model evaluates the fast model’s answers and continuously improves it. Baidu Sparse Attention (BSA) compresses cached information about earlier text during generation to cut inference costs.

Baidu says the model runs on a single eight-card Kunlunxin server and cuts inference engine costs by more than 30 per cent, Pandaily reported. No benchmarks have been published.

Qianfan and OpenRouter list ERNIE-Light-DT-1.0, which Baidu says is built on open-source GLM models and research from the Lightning model. Pandaily noted that Baidu has not said whether the two are the same product or disclosed the models’ context windows. Citing Qianfan’s documentation, the AICoder website reported that ERNIE-Light-DT-1.0 has a context window of 1 million tokens and costs 0.008 yuan per 1,000 input tokens and 0.028 yuan per 1,000 output tokens.

Video model and chips

Another new model, ERNIE-Wizshot-ME, makes the person in an image speak in a 4–15-second 1080p video. It accepts scripts of up to 4,000 characters and has a list price of 0.7 yuan per second. Baidu claims its production cost is half the industry norm.

Baidu AI Cloud also presented a 1,024-card Tianchi supernode with fully optical interconnects. The press release says Kunlunxin’s M100 inference chip has shipped and the M300 is expected in 2027.

Enterprise customers and partners can use the models’ APIs on Qianfan. Token Exchange runs at cysuo.com. Users must register with a phone number and verify their identity.