Baidu’s competition with ByteDance has been brought into sharper focus by a recent lawsuit. The Beijing Haidian Court recently announced a judgement in which an internet technology company was sued by Baidu for unfair competition for massively scraping over 600,000 entries from the Baidu Baike (Baidu Encyclopedia) platform. After hearing the case, the Haidian Court found the company guilty of unfair competition, ordering it to cease its infringing activities, eliminate the impact, and compensate Baidu for economic losses of 5 million yuan and reasonable expenses of 3 million yuan.
According to multiple sources, the internet technology company in question is Hudong Baike, which was wholly acquired by ByteDance in 2019. Insiders say the illegal scraping primarily occurred before Hudong Baike was acquired by ByteDance.
This case is the first in China involving competition for encyclopedia entry data and marks one of the highest-value lawsuits between Baidu and ByteDance.
An encyclopedia is a content ecosystem, which in the past was an important component of a company’s strategy for laying out the search engine market. ByteDance’s acquisition of the encyclopedia was intended to enter the search market. However, as ByteDance shifts its strategic focus from search toward content platforms, coupled with the technological revolution brought about by Artificial Intelligence (AI), tech giants are now betting on super-portals in the age of AI rather than simply search functions.
The competition between Baidu and ByteDance will not end; on the contrary, it will intensify with the iteration of AI technology.
The Start of Competition
Although encyclopedias are a relatively niche area, as a content ecosystem, they are an important part of the search market.
According to information made publicly available by the Beijing Haidian Court, Hudong Baike used technical means to scrape over 600,000 entries from Baidu Baike in batches, while simultaneously forging user information, uploading the scraped content to its website in the form of regular user posts, creating a substantial substitute for the Baidu Baike website.
Baidu won this case. The Beijing Haidian Court held that the aforementioned internet technology company lacked legal authorization, disrupted market competition order, did not enhance overall social welfare, and would damage the long-term interests of the public and consumers, violating the "Anti-Unfair Competition Law" and constituting unfair competition.
This is the first case in China involving competition for encyclopedia entry data. The judge pointed out that this case includes the benefits gained by encyclopedia website operators through the collection, storage, organization, management, and dissemination of massive encyclopedia entries into the scope of competition law protection, providing ideas for the protection path of public data and the adjudication of similar cases.
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 Jinri Toutiao Technology Co., Ltd. Conservatively estimated, there are at least 234 judicial cases between Baidu and ByteDance.
From the perspective of the case types, the disputes between Baidu and ByteDance mainly revolve around unfair competition and copyright ownership disputes, mainly occurring between 2018 and 2021, with each side winning and losing. For example, in 2018, ByteDance sued Baidu for unfair competition, claiming that Baidu slandered Jinri Toutiao on its search pages, and the court ordered Baidu to compensate ByteDance 500,000 yuan. According to a summary by the "Wall Street Journal", 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 bone for ByteDance to crack.
In just six years, ByteDance’s ambition for search has long faded. This compensation of up to 8 million yuan seems more like the tuition fee ByteDance paid for its past strategic trial and error.
In 2019, ByteDance officially launched the "Toutiao Search" APP, starting to lay out the search field. In order to build a search content ecosystem, ByteDance acquired Hudong Baike in the same year, and subsequently launched "Toutiao Baike". In 2023, "Toutiao Baike" was upgraded to "Douyin Baike", and later renamed "Kuaidong Baike", but ByteDance’s encyclopedia business has not taken off.
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 US dollars, but was unsuccessful. In 2023, ByteDance changed the name of the "Toutiao Search" APP to "YouShi," shifting the product positioning from search to a content platform equivalent to Xiaohongshu, focusing on life guides, 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. The "Wall Street Journal" learned that as of the fourth quarter of 2024, Xiaohongshu’s daily search volume reached 600 million, while Baidu’s daily search volume was in the billions, indicating that Xiaohongshu’s search scale has already posed a threat to Baidu.
Unfortunately, the "YouShi" created by ByteDance did not support this very promising content community strategy. Now, "YouShi" has become an ordinary member of ByteDance’s APP factory.
Competition in the AI Field
Over the past three decades, the Chinese internet has experienced the portal era, the BAT era, and the mobile internet era. Now, the AI era is sweeping in, and tech giants are betting on the AI field, where Baidu and ByteDance meet again on a narrow road.
From the timeline, Baidu reacted faster than ByteDance and was one of the first companies in China to lay out large models. As early as 2019, Baidu released the ERNIE model 1.0. After ChatGPT swept the world overnight in late 2022, Baidu also took the lead in launching the generative AI product ERNIE Bot (later renamed "ERNIE Bot").
ByteDance’s response to AI was slower. It was not until 2023 that ByteDance began to discuss GPT in internal meetings. However, adhering to the belief that diligence brings miracles, ByteDance has made unprecedented efforts. Zhang Yiming personally visited the authors of cutting-edge AI technology papers and offered feedback on their AI products.
Currently, both Baidu and ByteDance play the roles of AI infrastructure and AI application providers in the AI industry. Baidu has built a full-stack layout including the chip layer (Kunlun chip), the framework layer (PaddlePaddle), the model layer (ERNIE), and the application layer, while ByteDance’s AI layout covers AI basic research, the Doubao model family, and the application ecosystem.
This also means that Baidu and ByteDance will engage in comprehensive competition in terms of models, applications, cloud computing, and other aspects. At the same time, this battlefield also includes tech giants such as Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, as well as numerous startups including DeepSeek. This is a comprehensive competition that tests strategies, technologies, business models, and other capabilities. At present, the most definite battlefield for AI is cloud computing, which is also an area where Baidu and ByteDance compete fiercely. In February of this year, Shen Dou, Executive Vice President of Baidu Group and President of Baidu AI Cloud Business Group, said at an internal meeting that last year’s “malicious” price war in the domestic market resulted in the overall revenue of the industry being far lower than that of foreign markets, making the competition for large models in China extremely fierce.
The criticism directly pointed to ByteDance. In May 2024, ByteDance launched the Doubao large model family, in which the main model for the enterprise market was priced at only 0.0008 yuan per 1,000 tokens, 99.3% lower than the industry average, marking the entry of large model prices into the “Fen” era. Subsequently, Alibaba, Tencent, Zhipu, and other companies followed suit, triggering a “price war” in the domestic large model market.
In response to Baidu’s accusations, Tan Dai, President of Volcano Engine, said through social media, “Domestic and foreign manufacturers are relying on technological innovation to reduce model prices. We have only achieved the price level of Gemini 2.0 Flash, which is entirely dependent on technological progress.” He further added, “Everyone should focus on fundamentals and innovation like DeepSeek, remain calm, avoid unfounded speculation, and attribute problems 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 AI Cloud’s revenue increased by 42% year-on-year, accounting for 26% of core revenue, further consolidating its position.
Volcano Engine is also experiencing rapid growth. The "Wall Street Journal" reported that as of the end of March 2025, the daily token usage of the Doubao large model has reached 12.7 trillion, an increase of more than 100 times since its launch last May. According to the IDC report "China Public Cloud Large Model Service Market Pattern Analysis, Q1 2025", Volcano Engine ranks first with a market share of 46.4%, followed by Baidu AI Cloud.
In terms of AI applications to the C-end, Baidu’s main product ERNIE Bot and ByteDance’s main products Doubao and Jimo are still in competition. According to QuestMobile data, as of March 2025, the monthly active users of Doubao and Jimo AI were 116 million and 8.9 million respectively, ranking second and fifth in the domestic AI native application list, while ERNIE Bot ranked sixth with 8.87 million monthly active users.
Currently, AI technology is still the biggest factor affecting industry changes, and both Baidu and ByteDance are still in the investment stage of AI.
At the beginning of this year, the ByteDance Doubao large model team has established a long-term AGI research team internally, codenamed “Seed Edge”, to encourage cutting-edge AGI exploration. According to a report by Zheshang Securities, ByteDance’s capital expenditure in 2024 is expected to reach 80 billion yuan, and will reach 160 billion yuan in 2025. In the earnings call, Baidu also announced its plan to continue to increase AI investment in 2025, focusing on areas including AI cloud services, the ERNIE model, autonomous driving technology, and AI search transformation.
One is a traditional internet giant, and the other is a new king of the mobile internet; the contest between Baidu and ByteDance needs more time to verify. More than two years have passed since the advent of ChatGPT, and domestic giants are working hard to break away from the status of followers and enter the stage of genuine technological innovation. This will be a competition for global AI discourse power, and neither Baidu nor ByteDance can afford to be complacent.