Baidu opens Ernie Bot to the public after Beijing greenlight

Remember when Baidu's initial Ernie Bot demo used pre-recorded videos and sent its stock tumbling? That shaky start is now in the rearview mirror.

Baidu officially rolled out its Ernie Bot chatbot to the public following regulatory clearance in China. The app shot past 1 million users within its first 19 hours.

Open doors and an app ecosystem

Users can grab Ernie Bot directly from app stores or Baidu's website. Functionally, it covers familiar ChatGPT territory: drafting market analysis, generating marketing hooks, summarizing dense documents, and handling open-ended Q&A.

Alongside the chatbot, Baidu rolled out a dedicated plug-in market. While the mobile app is listed on global app stores including the US iOS and Android markets, the interface is currently Chinese-only, and registration still requires a mainland Chinese phone number.

Baidu co-founder and CEO Robin Li framed the public launch around data flywheels. Putting Ernie in front of everyday users allows the company to collect massive, real-world human feedback to retrain its foundation model.

Li also teased that Baidu plans to release a suite of brand-new, AI-native apps focused on the four pillars of generative AI: understanding, generation, reasoning, and memory.

The green light cohort

Baidu didn't cross the finish line alone. The release follows compliance checks under China's new generative AI guidelines, which require security assessments and mandate that training data comes from sources approved as legitimate by regulators.

According to Reuters, several other domestic players secured simultaneous clearance, including SenseTime, Baichuan Intelligent Technology, Zhipu AI, and MiniMax.

The era of invite codes and closed waitlists for Chinese large language models is officially over.

Why it matters

For everyday users in China, this is the easiest native alternative to ChatGPT yet. There are no workarounds, no waitlists, and no subscription fees standing between millions of workers and automated document work or brainstorming tools.

For the AI landscape, the gloves are off. Benchmark brags and closed betas do not matter anymore; companies now have to stomach real-world serving costs, handle massive concurrent traffic, and keep users coming back.

We think Baidu played this smartly. Rolling out open access and launching a plug-in market right away is the fastest antidote to its rocky March demo. Li knows that winning in foundation models requires high-volume real-world prompts and human feedback loops.

The real test will be retention and cost. Baidu must prove it can deliver utility that hooks users beyond the initial launch hype, all while navigating strict content guidelines and footing an enormous cloud inference bill.