China’s biggest tech firms are turning artificial intelligence tokens into a new form of internal currency, reshaping how employees access and report AI-powered work. At one Beijing-based ByteDance employee said he consumes close to a billion tokens a month — and that level of use “doesn’t even put me near the top of the consumption rankings in my department.”
## AI tokens as a measurable corporate unit
Known in mainland China as ciyuan, AI tokens are the basic unit through which AI services are measured and billed. Every prompt sent to a model and every response generated consumes tokens, in much the same way electricity is measured in kilowatt-hours. The tokens themselves cannot be spent on everyday goods — “that currency is not yuan, but artificial intelligence tokens” — yet they are increasingly treated as a corporate allowance for internal workflows.
## Tokens integrated into daily work
Tech groups from ByteDance to Alibaba and Tencent are encouraging staff to fold AI into routine tasks, and employees now budget token use alongside time. “Using AI has become part of almost every task now,” the ByteDance employee said, requesting anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media. Consumption rankings and token allocations are being used as a de facto measure of AI engagement and, by employers’ logic, AI literacy.
## A price war that makes AI cheap
The rapid uptake of AI tokens in firms has been amplified by aggressive price competition in China’s AI sector. In May, Hangzhou-based AI firm DeepSeek cut the price of its flagship V4‑Pro model by 75 per cent, a move that industry observers say highlights a broader race to make intelligence inexpensive. The resulting fall in unit costs lowers the barrier for heavy internal use and helps explain the large token volumes reported by employees.
The shift turns AI consumption into a quantifiable resource inside companies: tokens are tracked, allocated and compared across teams. For staff, that means managing not only projects and time but also the flow of AI tokens as part of their daily workflows.
This trend presents a new operational metric for tech firms and a different kind of workplace economy, where the cost and volume of AI usage are both budgetary line items and signals of employee engagement with AI tools.
