Chinese tech giants ($BABA, Tencent, Bytedance) are flooding the market with free AI integrations everywhere. It's a land-grab play—embed models into every product surface to lock in users before monetization kicks in. Think Douyin AI assistants, WeChat AI features, Alibaba Cloud inference APIs at near-zero cost. The strategy mirrors early mobile internet: distribute first, extract value later once you own the behavioral data and usage patterns. This creates massive inference infrastructure demand and trains models on real-world interaction data at scale. Western companies charge per token while Chinese players are subsidizing adoption to build moats. Different playbook, same goal: whoever owns the AI touchpoints owns the next platform layer.