Chinese banks and phone carriers have started treating AI tokens the raw units that pay for a chatbot's answers like a loyalty perk instead of a paid product. Moonshot AI launched a Kimi credit card with Agricultural Bank of China and American Express in July 2026 that pays cardholders in AI tokens and coding credits. China Merchants Bank offers up to 1.8 billion tokens for MiniMax's models to new cardholders, and Shanghai Pudong Development Bank goes further: up to 3 billion tokens for Alibaba's Qwen.

The giveaways work because tokens got absurdly cheap. Chinese models now cost 60-90% less to run than the equivalent from OpenAI or Anthropic, so handing out billions of them barely dents a bank's marketing budget. Daily token use across China jumped from 100 billion in early 2024 to roughly 500 trillion by mid-2026. One industry analyst called the whole push a "supply-led experiment" most people using these tokens still don't know what a token actually is.

Phone carriers followed the same logic. China Telecom sells plans from 9.9 yuan ($1.40) for 10 million tokens through its own TokenHub, which routes to 142 different AI models. China Mobile charges 1 yuan (14 cents) for 400,000 tokens, billed straight to a phone account. On the street, a Beijing bar throws in free DeepSeek access with a drink, and a dumpling restaurant hands out computing-credit vouchers after dinner.

Why it matters: in China, AI access is turning into a bundled freebie before most users even understand what they're being given a preview of how fast the cost of running AI could collapse everywhere else.

Source: https://restofworld.org