Baidu's ERNIE Bot receives regulatory approval for public release

Baidu made ERNIE Bot, its ChatGPT-style chatbot, available to the general public in China, after clearing approval from Chinese regulators. The bot had previously been shown in a March demonstration and offered only to invited testers; the August release, downloadable as an app or accessible via Baidu’s website, was its first opening to any member of the public.

The approval followed a rule China’s internet regulator had issued that July, requiring companies to obtain a licence before releasing generative-AI services to the public — the first such requirement anywhere, and one that Baidu and ten other companies cleared on the same day, alongside ERNIE Bot. Baidu chairman Robin Li said the wider release would let the company draw on “a significant amount of feedback from hundreds of millions of netizens” to improve the underlying model. ERNIE Bot topped the free-download chart on Apple’s China App Store within roughly half a day of going public, and reporting at the time credited pent-up domestic demand given the unavailability of ChatGPT itself in China.

The episode illustrated how China’s generative-AI market developed under a licensing regime largely absent in the US and Europe at the time: rather than releasing to the public directly, Chinese labs went through invited-testing phases and formal state approval before consumer launch, with regulatory clearance itself becoming a newsworthy event and, for a company the size of Baidu, a marker of state acceptance of its product.