Volcano Engine, the cloud unit of TikTok owner ByteDance, has launched a new coding agent priced at just 9.9 yuan (RM5.75 or US$1.30) for the first month of subscription – underscoring the fierce competition in China’s booming AI developer tools market.
The Doubao-Seed-Code model, released on Tuesday, carries a standard monthly fee of 40 yuan (RM23), according to a company statement. The company unveiled its discounted one-month promotion on November 11, China’s annual Singles’ Day shopping festival.
ByteDance has been accelerating its artificial intelligence push, with usage of its Doubao chatbot doubling in the past six months, Volcano Engine president Tan Dai said at a corporate event in October.
The growth, he added, highlighted the rapid rise in AI adoption among Chinese consumers and reinforced ByteDance’s position among the world’s leading AI players.
The new model set a state-of-the-art record on the SWE-Bench Verified test, placing it on par with mainstream systems such as Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet.
The launch comes after Anthropic, a US AI start-up, updated its service restrictions in September to block access by subsidiaries of Chinese firms – the latest sign of growing polarisation in the global AI landscape.
Volcano Engine said Doubao-Seed-Code supported popular development tools including veCLI, Cursor and Cline, and was compatible with APIs such as Anthropic’s.
It described the agent as the most affordable coding assistant in China, priced about 62.7% below the industry average.
The latest Doubao version can process up to 256,000 words per query, allowing it to handle complex codebases and speed up full-stack application development.
According to Volcano Engine, Doubao-Seed-Code was built on a large-scale, agent-intensive training system and was now fully integrated into its Singapore-based coding app Trae – just six days after ByteDance cut off access to Anthropic’s Claude models following the American firm’s service restructure affecting Chinese-owned entities worldwide.
Following its integration with the Trae environment, the model achieved a 78.8% score on the SWE-Bench Verified benchmark, according to the company statement.
Chinese AI developers have been rolling out new models at a rapid pace in recent months, including Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 reasoning variant and MiniMax’s M2, which sparked comparisons to the earlier “DeepSeek moment” that energised China’s AI sector. – South China Morning Post
