Since the release of the DeepSeek series of open-source models in the early 25th, it has sparked a wave of development in the AI field. With global attention gathering, the past year has witnessed the rapid evolution of technology in the entire AI industry, from "concept verification" to "commercialization".

With the arrival of the Spring Festival in the Lunar New Year of the Horse, the world's attention has again focused on Chinese AI. An AI application marketing war, led by three Internet giants and costing 10 billion yuan, also serves as an important node for AI to move towards mass applications, and previews the cruel prospect of the next stage of competition to the entire industry.

As of this week, the Yuanxiao (Filled round balls made of glutinous rice-flour for Lantern Festival) has passed and the Lunar New Year has begun to end, Diandian Data hereby reviews the whole story of the "ten billion red envelope war", and preliminarily analyzes the gains and losses of all parties from the data dimension.

Under the smoke of billions of gunpowder, the three giants show their own abilities

The Chinese New Year AI Application Billion Battle covers a wide range of domestic AI application companies, but the main battlefield is still controlled by the top three players - Tencent Yuanbao, Alibaba Tongyi, and ByteDance. According to DataEye Research Institute's prediction, the cost of marketing campaigns for these three AI products before and after the Spring Festival alone has exceeded 10 billion yuan, including 1 billion yuan for Yuanbao, 1.5-2 billion yuan for Doubao, and 6 billion yuan for Qianwen.

It is precisely with the input and promotion of these three protagonists that the unprecedented intensity of this "AI man snatching war" has been achieved. In order to capture users' minds during the golden window of the Spring Festival, the three companies have also employed completely different marketing strategies based on their respective genes and chips.

Among the three, Tencent Yuanbao was the first to make a move. According to the statistics from Diandian, during the Spring Festival (from February 1 to March 3 [Yuanxiao (Filled round balls made of glutinous rice-flour for Lantern Festival) Festival]), the launch time of three applications can also be found that Tencent Yuanbao launched Spring Festival related theme activities as early as February 1, while the launch time of the other two applications was around February 8.

However, in reality, Tencent Yuanbao's Spring Festival event preheating started at the end of January even earlier. On January 25th, Tencent Yuanbao launched the "Up Yuanbao, Divide into 1 Billion" activity reservation, which was officially launched on February 1st. On the day of its launch, the "Yuanbao" app also officially launched the "Yuanbao Pie Red Envelope New Year Collection" themed activity at 3:00 pm on the same day. The activity includes various forms such as 10000 yuan small horse cards, cash red envelopes, and shared red envelopes. Users can collect cash red envelopes on the Yuanbao App every day and draw more red envelopes by completing tasks.

In addition, on the New Year's Eve of February 16th, Yuanbao launched functions such as "New Year's Red Envelope Cover" and "New Year's Friend Circle" with the theme of "celebrating the Spring Festival with Yuanbao". Users can generate New Year's red envelope covers, and post creative content such as horse year couplets and New Year paintings on WeChat with just one click. There is also a chance to receive Easter egg red envelopes by liking and interacting.

In short, leveraging Tencent's advantage in the social field, "Yuanbao" also attempts to replicate the social fission myth of WeChat red envelopes in the past, and through the "cash fission" model, its application has also achieved a peak in user growth in the short term. According to the statistics of Diandian, on the day when Tencent Yuanbao officially launched the red envelope activity on February 1, the activity covering the circle of friends instantly helped its app top the free list of App Store in Chinese Mainland and dominate the list for five consecutive days.

What ended Tencent Yuanbao's dominance on the leaderboard was a cup of milk tea from Alibaba's Qianwen. On February 6th, Alibaba's AI application "Qianwen" officially launched the new Spring Festival version and announced the official launch of the "3 billion Spring Festival treat plan". During the entire event, Alibaba invested over 6 billion yuan (including subsequent increases) to invite users to experience "one sentence ordering" in order to avoid single orders. The event deeply connected the Alibaba ecosystem of Taobao flash purchases, Fliggy, Damai, Hema, etc., covering the entire scene of buying movie tickets, booking hotels, ordering takeout, and other food, drink, and entertainment activities.

The most popular one among them is the scene of "AI invites milk tea". According to official data, during the Spring Festival, Tongyi Qianwen placed nearly 200 million orders with just one sentence. On the opening day of the activity on February 6, "Qianwen" also succeeded "Yuanbao" in topping the free list of App Store in Chinese Mainland, and continued to dominate the list until the 13th.

It is not difficult to see from the review of all the activity information during the Spring Festival period of "Qianwen" that its core theme is highly focused on the concept of "AI life assistant" proposed in the January version update. Behind this coherent action is the clear strategic intention of "Qianwen": to make "AI life assistant" the first cognitive label in users' minds about the product.

ByteDance has placed its chips on top of the peak traffic of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala nationwide, adopting a strategy of winning the exclusive AI cloud partner for the 2026 Spring Festival Gala. During the Spring Festival Gala, Doubao not only distributed cash red envelopes, but also gave out over 100000 high-value technology products including Yushu robots and DJI drones. The high degree of binding with the Spring Festival Gala has brought a lot of exposure and traffic to Doubao. According to DianDian data statistics, its official app "Doubao" reached the 100 million mark on domestic daily active sites on New Year's Eve.

At the same time, the release of the Seedance 2.0 audio and video generation model has become a key factor in the sustained growth of post festival data for 'Bean Bun'. This model performs impressively in terms of motion stability and physical fidelity, especially in multi-agent interactions and complex motion scenes. Its video generation availability has surpassed Sora 2 Pro, Veo 3.1, and Kling series, reaching the world's leading SOTA level. With the launch of the 2.0 series of Doubao big model, represented by Seedance 2.0, the product strength of Doubao has achieved a qualitative leap, and the daily download volume has reached new highs. Since then, it has ranked first in the free App Store list in Chinese Mainland.

Real performance of three major AI applications in data restoration

Overall, if we calculate the Android platform, 'Dou Bao' is a dominant player in both download volume and activity data. Observing only the data trends of the three applications on the App Store platform may provide a more intuitive reflection of the corresponding changes in data at the implementation nodes of their marketing strategies.

The overall trend of download volume can basically correspond to the time nodes of the Spring Festival activities when the three applications were launched. "Dou Bao" benefited from the popularity of the Spring Festival Gala after the New Year's Eve node on February 16th, and its download volume surpassed "Yuan Bao" and "Qian Wen" and continued to maintain a leading position. However, "Yuan Bao" experienced a continuous decline in download volume after the impact of two consecutive events launched by "Qian Wen" and "Dou Bao", until around the 23rd, when there was a slight rebound, but the overall data was significantly lagging behind.

From the perspective of the overall platform download trend, the most intuitive reflection is the surpassing of "Yuanbao" data by "Qianwen" during the Spring Festival period, as well as the terrifying data growth of "Doubao". The reason for the former can be attributed to Alibaba Qianwen's relatively larger investment in capital, and the actual value of a cup of milk tea is indeed more appealing than sharing passwords on social media or being seen as a "thankless" trick by users.

The changing trend of activity data may better reflect the impact of the application itself, that is, the technical strength on user data. Alibaba launched a surprise release on New Year's Eve and opened sourced a new generation of big model Qianwen Qwen3.5-Plus, making visual programming a true productivity tool and helping it consolidate its position in the programming field. ByteDance's Seedance 2.0 has helped it build a complete multimodal technology matrix, and its model capability and the popularity of its works have become synonymous with its technical strength, becoming an important weight for users to choose AI application preferences. This has also helped it grow stronger and soar higher under the support of traffic dividends.

The retention of newly installed users during the Spring Festival period of the three applications can also prove the attractiveness of the product's technical strength to users.

In addition, there are significant differences in the proportion of user age in the user profile data of the three applications. Among them, the age distribution of users on Doubao is relatively even, with the proportion of users over 50 years old being much higher than the average of similar applications; Due to the influx of "AI ordering milk tea" users, a large proportion of 24-30-year-old young people are using "Qianwen"; And the proportion of users aged 31-40 in "Yuanbao" reached nearly half, accounting for 48.6%

Global performance of other AI applications during the Spring Festival period

Baidu Wenxin:

Baidu Wenxin has also contributed a lot of ammunition to this billion dollar battle this year. Since the announcement of the launch of the Spring Festival red envelope campaign on January 25th, the campaign has continued until the release of this article, with a total investment of 500 million yuan and a more direct cash red envelope model, with a maximum of 10000 yuan per red envelope.

The gameplay of the activity, in addition to AI interactive card collection and guessing passwords from Matu, combines core AI functions with a red envelope collection mechanism in an innovative way that is eye-catching. Users need to actually use their abilities such as taking photos to recognize everything and AI generated video creation to participate in dividing red envelopes. In addition, Baidu AI also appeared as the chief AI partner on the 2026 Beijing Broadcasting and Television Spring Festival Gala on the evening of February 17th. However, the overall exposure and influence are still difficult to compare with the first three.

In the battle for user access in domestic AI applications, Baidu is actually in an important development window period. What are the challenges faced by Perplexity, which was invested by Cristiano Ronaldo and valued at $20 billion in four years, from an intelligent search tool to an AI agent e-commerce model pioneer? 》The case of Perplexity AI has revealed the real challenge of search engine tools transitioning to "AI task execution platforms". For Baidu, the pressure of monetization is not as heavy as that, but exploring the path towards Agentic AI may still be the only way to consolidate its industry position.

Ant Afu:

As another AI application flagship launched by Alibaba during the Spring Festival, Ant Group's Alpha has become one of the biggest dark horses in the Spring Festival AI battle by avoiding the general AI red ocean and betting on the high professional barriers of the medical and health track.

According to DianDian data statistics, the download volume of "Ant Afu" exceeded 9.6 million during the Spring Festival period, with App Store downloads exceeding 4.44 million. From the trend of App Store downloads, the daily download volume of this application once surpassed "Doubao", "Qianwen", and "Yuanbao" from February 13th to February 17th, and it has consistently ranked first in the free list of medical applications since its launch.

Its impressive data performance during the Spring Festival is partly due to Alibaba's investment in promotion, such as the official announcement on February 10th that it has become a CCTV Healthy Living Partner; On the New Year's Eve of February 16th, the skit "Blood Pressure Monitor" was performed on the CCTV Spring Festival Gala stage; During the Spring Festival holiday (from New Year's Eve to the seventh day of the lunar new year), new users can get 16.8 yuan of Alipay threshold free red packets when registering. On the other hand, the strong technological endorsement behind it and the connection to the national healthcare system ecosystem are also fundamental to building its dark horse position.

Claude by Anthropic

As the Spring Festival draws to a close, Claude, the AI programming assistant that global developers rely on for survival, experienced a global malfunction that lasted for more than 10 hours and crashed four times in a row. At that time, it coincided with the morning rush in the East Coast of the United States, with nearly 2000 users reporting the problem at the same time, causing social media to wail and various related topics to quickly become popular. However, for general product companies, this can be considered a major technical accident or a serious event that affects product reputation. For Anthropic, the company behind Claude, it may just be a "happy annoyance".

The whole story can be traced back to OpenAI quickly signing a $200 million Pentagon contract that was rejected by Anthropic for maintaining user information security. OpenAI's disregard for potential risks has sparked the # CancelChatGPT movement on social media, leading to a 295% surge in ChatGPT uninstallation in the United States. At the same time, Anthropic also added fuel to the fire by launching a 60 second "memory moving" tool, allowing ChatGPT and Gemini users to easily migrate personal information and preferences from their original AI to Claude with just one click.

Under the trend of fluctuating trends, according to real-time ranking data from DianDian, "Claude by Anthropic" surpassed "ChatGPT" in the free ranking of the App Store in the United States on March 1st and topped the overall ranking. In addition, the one star rating of ChatGPT in the app store has also rapidly increased, and the number of comments has skyrocketed from around 200 to over 1300. The AI comment summary report generated by the DianDian data platform for "ChatGPT" can also restore the true context of this event through key nodes and recommended monitoring indicators.

Looking at the entire incident, it is the happy annoyance of an AI company unexpectedly encountering a flood of users due to adhering to ethical bottom lines, resulting in the server being squeezed out. But the ethical stance and values of AI companies reflected in the incident are becoming important variables influencing user choices. On the other hand, OpenAI's predicament serves as a warning to all AI companies: when your product cannot provide irreplaceable value, users may easily migrate with just one click.