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Physix Frontier · News Briefing Card (IT Home · Aug 30, 2026)

China's Data Bureau Pilots Token Subscriptions and Pay-Per-Use Models

KEY FACTS

  • The National Data Administration plans to pilot value-added token subscriptions and pay-for-performance business models in major scenarios.
  • Preliminary trials for data annotation will launch across 32 cities, covering sectors such as industry and healthcare.
  • Daily token invocation volume in China exceeded 500 trillion by June.
  • The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) is leading a joint effort with Huawei and 21 other entities to prepare token service operations.

KEY DATA

500T+Daily Token Invocation Volume
32Data Annotation Pilot Cities
22Token Working Group Participants

PHYSIX OBSERVATION

Regulators have explicitly defined the commercialization path for tokens as the standard metric for AI services, signaling a shift from ambiguous to standardized pricing for large models. If implemented, pay-for-performance models will force vendors to prioritize inference efficiency over merely scaling parameter counts. Simultaneously, the rollout of national-level data annotation bases aims to address the scarcity of high-quality corpora, providing essential infrastructure for the iteration of domestic models.

Source: IT Home report