Chinese companies are gaining ground in the global race to develop the next generation of artificial intelligence — not just chatbots, but autonomous agents designed to handle complex tasks with minimal human input.
In recent months, Chinese tech giants and startups have launched their own agents. Startups Butterfly Effect and Zhipu claim their tools outperform OpenAI’s Deep Research in some metrics. Giants such as Alibaba and ByteDanceiByteDanceByteDance is a Chinese internet technology company that owns TikTok and Douyin, a Chinese version of TikTok with a successful e-commerce arm.READ MORE are powering agents with their in-house foundation AI models, going toe-to-toe with platforms from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others.
Global investments in the technology are surging as businesses increasingly pursue automation to boost efficiency and cut costs. An IBM global survey found more than 60% of CEOs are already deploying and planning to scale their use of AI agents.
Agent capabilities vary widely — from travel planning to app development — and a lack of common benchmarks also makes it difficult to evaluate and compare performance.
“Many Chinese tech companies are labeling their products as AI agents just to capitalize on the hype … leading to uneven product quality,” a report by U.S. market intelligence firm IDC said. Agent performance depends heavily on the foundation AI models they are built on, experts told Rest of World.
