ByteDance and Baidu's competition escalates

Author | Liu Baodan

Editor | Huang Yu

A lawsuit has brought the competition between Baidu and ByteDance back into the spotlight.

Recently, the Beijing Haidian Court announced a ruling. A certain network technology company was sued by Baidu for unfair competition due to the large-scale scraping of over 600,000 entries from the Baidu Encyclopedia platform. After hearing the case, the Haidian Court determined that the company constituted unfair competition, ordering it to cease the infringing activities, eliminate the impact, and compensate for economic losses of 5 million yuan and reasonable expenses of 3 million yuan.

According to multiple sources, the aforementioned network technology company is Interactive Encyclopedia, which was fully acquired by ByteDance in 2019. According to insiders, the illegal scraping activities mainly occurred before Interactive Encyclopedia was acquired by ByteDance.

This is the first case in the country involving competition over encyclopedia entry data and is also the highest amount involved in the numerous lawsuits between Baidu and ByteDance.

Encyclopedia is a type of content ecosystem and was an important lever for companies to layout the search engine market in the past. ByteDance's acquisition of the encyclopedia was aimed at the search market. However, as ByteDance shifted its strategic focus from search to content platforms, coupled with the technological revolution brought about by AI, tech giants are now betting on the super entrance of the AI era rather than a single search function.

The competition between Baidu and ByteDance will not end; instead, it will intensify with the iteration of AI technology.

Clash

Encyclopedia is a relatively niche field, yet as a content ecosystem, it was an important component of the search market.

Based on the publicly available information from the Beijing Haidian Court, Interactive Encyclopedia used technical means to batch scrape over 600,000 entries from Baidu Encyclopedia while falsifying user information, uploading the scraped content to its operational website in the form of ordinary user posts, which had a substantial substitutive effect on the Baidu Encyclopedia website.

Baidu won this lawsuit. The Beijing Haidian Court held that the aforementioned network technology company lacked legal authorization, disrupted market competition order, did not enhance overall social welfare, and would harm public interests and consumers' long-term interests, violating the Anti-Unfair Competition Law and constituting unfair competition.

This is the first case in the country involving competition over encyclopedia entry data. The judge noted that this case brings the benefits obtained by encyclopedia website operators through the collection, storage, arrangement, management, and dissemination of massive encyclopedia entries into the protection scope of competition law, providing ideas for the protection path of publicly available data sets and similar case adjudication.

This is not the first clash between Baidu and ByteDance. According to Tianyancha, since 2016, there have been 41 cases between Baidu and Beijing Douyin Technology Co., Ltd., 187 cases between Baidu and Beijing Douyin Information Service Co., Ltd., and 6 cases between Baidu and Zhejiang Today Headline Technology Co., Ltd. Conservatively estimated, there have been at least 234 judicial cases between Baidu and ByteDance.

From the case types, the disputes between Baidu and ByteDance mainly revolve around unfair competition and copyright ownership disputes, primarily occurring between 2018 and 2021, with both sides having their victories and losses. For example, in 2018, ByteDance sued Baidu for unfair competition, claiming that Baidu defamed Today Headline on the search page, and the court ordered Baidu to compensate ByteDance 500,000 yuan According to a summary by Wall Street News, the competition between Baidu and ByteDance mainly occurs in the fields of information flow, short videos, and search, especially search, which is Baidu's core business and the hardest nut for ByteDance to crack.

In just six years, ByteDance's ambition for search has long diminished. The result of this high compensation of 8 million seems more like a tuition fee paid by ByteDance for its past strategic trial and error.

In 2019, ByteDance officially launched the "Toutiao Search" app, beginning its layout in the search field. To build a search content ecosystem, ByteDance acquired Interactive Encyclopedia in the same year and subsequently launched "Toutiao Encyclopedia." In 2023, "Toutiao Encyclopedia" was upgraded to "Douyin Encyclopedia," and later renamed "Kuaidong Encyclopedia," but ByteDance's encyclopedia business has not shown any improvement.

At the same time, ByteDance intends to downplay search and shift its focus to content communities. In 2021, ByteDance attempted to acquire Xiaohongshu for $20 billion but was unsuccessful. In 2023, ByteDance renamed the "Toutiao Search" app to "Youshi," repositioning the product from search to a content platform comparable to Xiaohongshu, focusing on life strategies, with content covering food, life experiences, practical skills, and more.

It can be said that ByteDance's strategy of betting on content communities is quite forward-looking. Wall Street News learned that by the fourth quarter of 2024, Xiaohongshu's daily search volume reached 600 million, while Baidu's daily search volume is in the billions, indicating that Xiaohongshu's search scale has already posed a threat to Baidu.

Unfortunately, the "Youshi" created by ByteDance has not supported this very promising strategy for content communities. Now, "Youshi" has become just an ordinary member of ByteDance's app factory.

Competing in AI

Over the past thirty years, China's internet industry has experienced the portal era, the BAT era, and the mobile internet era. Now, the AI era is roaring in, and tech giants are scrambling to bet on the AI track, with Baidu and ByteDance meeting again on a narrow path.

From a timeline perspective, Baidu reacted faster than ByteDance and was one of the first companies in the country to lay out large models. As early as 2019, Baidu released the Wenxin large model 1.0. At the end of 2022, after ChatGPT became a global sensation overnight, Baidu also took the lead in launching the generative AI product Wenxin Yiyan (later renamed "Wenxiaoyan").

ByteDance's response to AI has been slower. It wasn't until 2023 that ByteDance began discussing GPT in internal meetings. However, believing that hard work brings miracles, ByteDance has put forth unprecedented efforts, with Zhang Yiming personally visiting authors of cutting-edge AI technology papers and providing feedback on its AI products.

Currently, Baidu and ByteDance play roles as both AI infrastructure and AI application providers in the AI industry. Baidu has built a full-stack layout that includes chip layer (Kunlun chip), framework layer (PP Paddle), model layer (Wenxin), and application layer, while ByteDance's AI layout covers AI fundamental research, the Doubao model family, and application ecology.

This also means that Baidu and ByteDance will engage in comprehensive competition at the levels of models, applications, cloud computing, etc. At the same time, this battlefield also includes tech giants like Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, and many startups including DeepSeek, making it a comprehensive competition that tests capabilities in strategy, technology, business models, and more Currently, the most certain battlefield for AI is cloud computing, which is also the area where Baidu and ByteDance are in fierce competition. In February of this year, Shen Dou, Executive Vice President of Baidu Group and President of Baidu Intelligent Cloud Business Group, stated at an internal meeting that last year's "malicious" price war in the domestic market led to the overall revenue of the industry being several orders of magnitude lower than that of foreign markets, making the competition for large models in China extremely intense.

The criticism was aimed directly at ByteDance. In May 2024, ByteDance launched the Doubao large model family, with the main model priced at only 0.0008 yuan per 1,000 tokens in the enterprise market, which is 99.3% cheaper than the industry average, marking the entry of large model prices into the "cent era." Subsequently, companies like Alibaba, Tencent, and Zhizhu followed suit, triggering a "price war" in the domestic large model market.

In response to Baidu's accusations, Tan Dai, President of Volcano Engine, stated through social media that "both domestic and foreign manufacturers are relying on technological innovation to lower model prices. We have merely achieved the price level of Gemini 2.0 Flash, which is entirely dependent on technological advancements." He further added, "Everyone should focus on fundamentals and innovation like DeepSeek, remain calm, and avoid baseless speculation and attributing issues to external factors."

It is certain that both Baidu and ByteDance are beneficiaries of AI technology. On May 21, Baidu released its Q1 2025 report, achieving revenue of 32.5 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 3%, exceeding market expectations. Driven by strong demand for generative AI and large models, Baidu Intelligent Cloud's revenue grew by 42% year-on-year, accounting for 26% of core revenue, further enhancing its position.

Volcano Engine is also experiencing rapid growth. According to Wall Street Journal, as of the end of March 2025, the daily token usage of the Doubao large model has reached 12.7 trillion, growing over a hundred times since its launch in May last year. According to IDC's report "Analysis of the Chinese Public Cloud Large Model Service Market Landscape, 1Q25," Volcano Engine ranks first with a market share of 46.4%, followed closely by Baidu Intelligent Cloud.

In terms of AI to C applications, Baidu's main product Wenxiaoyan and ByteDance's main products Doubao and Jimeng are still in competition. According to QuestMobile data, as of March 2025, Doubao and Jimeng AI had monthly active users of 116 million and 8.9 million, ranking second and fifth respectively in the domestic AI native app list, while Wenxiaoyan ranked sixth with 8.87 million monthly active users.

Currently, AI technology remains the biggest factor influencing industry changes, and both Baidu and ByteDance are still in the investment phase for AI.

At the beginning of the year, the ByteDance Doubao large model team had already formed a long-term AGI research team internally, codenamed "Seed Edge," encouraging cutting-edge AGI exploration. According to a report by Zheshang Securities, ByteDance's capital expenditure is expected to reach 80 billion yuan in 2024 and 160 billion yuan in 2025. During the earnings call, Baidu also announced plans to continue increasing AI investments in 2025, with key investment areas including AI cloud services, Wenxin Yiyan model, autonomous driving technology, and AI search transformation.

One is a traditional internet giant, and the other is a new king of mobile internet; the showdown between Baidu and ByteDance will require more time to validate. More than two years have passed since ChatGPT, and domestic giants are striving to break free from a follower status and enter a true phase of technological innovation. This will be a global competition for AI discourse power, and both Baidu and ByteDance cannot afford to be complacent