Baidu unveils ERNIE 4.5 and reasoning model ERNIE X1, makes ERNIE Bot free

Baidu announced ERNIE 4.5, a native multimodal foundation model jointly trained on text, images, audio and video, and ERNIE X1, its first dedicated multimodal reasoning model with tool use, including web search, image understanding and code execution. Baidu said ERNIE 4.5 outperformed GPT-4.5 on multiple benchmarks while costing roughly 1% as much to use via API, and that ERNIE X1 matched the performance of DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model at about half the price — comparisons drawn from Baidu’s own benchmarking rather than independent evaluation.

Alongside the model launches, Baidu made both models free to individual users through the ERNIE Bot consumer app, moving up a previously announced switch to free access that had been scheduled for 1 April. Enterprise and API pricing remained metered, at rates Baidu published in the low single-digit yuan per thousand tokens.

The announcement came weeks after DeepSeek’s R1 release had unsettled assumptions about the cost of frontier-adjacent reasoning models and drawn heavy usage away from incumbent Chinese chatbots, and Baidu’s decision to accelerate free access and pointedly benchmark against DeepSeek was widely read, including by industry press, as a direct competitive response. It reflected a broader pattern that spring of Chinese labs cutting prices and consumer paywalls once DeepSeek had reset expectations about what a capable model should cost.

Baidu had been an early mover in China’s chatbot market with ERNIE Bot’s 2023 launch, but had lost ground in domestic attention to DeepSeek’s cheaper, open-weight releases through late 2024 and early 2025. Making its flagship consumer product free, rather than defending a subscription tier, signalled that Baidu judged retaining users and developer mindshare more valuable in the short term than the revenue those tiers had generated — the same calculation several of its domestic rivals made in the weeks that followed.