Ant Group

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Pony Ma, CEO, of Tencent Holdings. Photo by Justin Chin/ Getty Images
Exclusive

Tencent Joins China’s AI Agent Race With ‘Top-Secret’ WeChat Project

By Qianer Liu and Juro Osawa · Mar 10, 2026 6:00am PDT
Tencent Holdings is secretly building a new AI agent for its hugely popular WeChat messaging app, in hopes of leapfrogging rivals like Alibaba Group and ByteDance in the race to dominate China’s domestic AI market, according to four people familiar with the project. The project could dramatically widen how AI agents, which take actions on... Tencent Holdings is secretly building a new AI agent for its hugely popular WeChat messaging app,...
Alibaba headquarters in Hangzhou, China via Getty Images
Applied AI

Alibaba is Moving Faster Than Amazon and OpenAI in AI For Commerce

By Juro Osawa and Qianer Liu · Mar 5, 2026 10:53am PST
Last week, my colleague Qianer tested an AI agent inside Alibaba’s Qwen app, which resembles ChatGPT. She asked to get a ticket to see Pegasus 3, a comedy film about a race car driver that has been topping the Chinese box office. The agent found the nearest theater showing the movie and recommended seats and screening times for later in the day.... Last week, my colleague Qianer tested an AI agent inside Alibaba’s Qwen app, which resembles...
Art by Mike Sullivan.
AI Agenda

China’s AI Giveaway War

By Juro Osawa · Feb 17, 2026 7:05am PST
U.S. AI firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic haven’t yet turned a profit but they’re trying to get on the path to doing so. In China, the big tech firms behind AI chatbots are fighting a different battle.Chinese tech firms are competing so intensely to draw people to use their AI chatbots that they’re spending this week’s Lunar New Year holidays... U.S. AI firms such as OpenAI and Anthropic haven’t yet turned a profit but they’re trying to get...
Ant Group's office building in Nanjing, China. Photo by Getty.
Exclusive

Ant Group Will Cut Foreign Investors Out of Fast-Growing Database Business

By Jing Yang · Aug 22, 2023 6:00am PDT · 1 comment
When international investors such as General Atlantic and the Carlyle Group invested in Chinese fintech firm Ant Group in 2018, they likely hoped for a big payoff given its dominance in facilitating payments for both Chinese brick-and-mortar merchants and e-commerce sites such as Alibaba. Those hopes were dashed in 2020, when Chinese authorities... When international investors such as General Atlantic and the Carlyle Group invested in Chinese...