Red envelope war ignites! After the 2026 Spring Festival, will Chinese AI assistants usher in their "iPhone moment"?

When red envelopes once again become the “nuclear button” for China’s internet companies, this time, it’s not payment being ignited, but AI assistants.

According to Wind Chaser Trading Desk, as the 2026 Spring Festival approaches, competition among China’s internet giants for AI assistant traffic is rapidly heating up. Tencent and Baidu have taken the lead by announcing large-scale cash red envelope subsidies, and the market widely expects Alibaba and ByteDance to join the fray. An AI entry-point battle sparked by “Spring Festival red envelopes” has quietly begun.

Citi’s latest research report points out, this is not just a simple Spring Festival promotion, but more like a crucial verification window for China’s AI assistants to reach the inflection point of mass adoption.

From “red envelope user acquisition” to “AI entry-point competition,” the logic has fundamentally changed

Spring Festival red envelopes are nothing new.

From WeChat Pay and Alipay to short video platforms, every round of internet traffic reshuffling in the past decade has been accompanied by red envelope subsidy wars. But Citi stresses that in 2026, the difference is: The core target of competition has evolved from “an app” to “the traffic entry-point in the AI era.”

Citi believes that AI assistants have three characteristics that previous applications did not possess:

Innately high-frequency: Searching, Q&A, and content creation — the use scenarios are extremely fragmented yet highly routine.Strong platform attributes: Once established as the default entry point, they can continuously channel traffic to e-commerce, advertising, cloud, and finance.Ecological amplifier: AI is not a standalone monetization channel, but amplifies the efficiency and stickiness of the entire ecosystem.

This is why Citi defines 2026 as “the year the competition for AI chatbot traffic fully escalates.”

Spring Festival red envelopes are just the formality, the real test is “habit formation”

From disclosed information, the approaches of each company have already diverged:

Tencent: Yuanbao announced an investment of 1 billion yuan in cash red envelopes, using “try AI features—win prizes” as the core path, emphasizing high-frequency interaction and social spread.Baidu: Invested 500 million yuan in red envelopes, embedding its Wenxin Assistant deeply into the Baidu App, guiding users into repeated use through “AI interaction + card collecting gameplay.”ByteDance: Though it hasn’t disclosed the red envelope amount directly, it became CCTV Spring Festival Gala’s exclusive AI cloud partner through Volcano Engine, giving Doubao massive exposure in a “nationwide scenario.”Alibaba: Though it hasn’t officially announced Spring Festival red envelopes yet, its Tongyi Qianwen’s content interaction capabilities were validated in Bilibili’s New Year’s Eve gala, making a Spring Festival follow-up highly likely.

Citi points out that the essence of the Spring Festival red envelope isn’t the subsidy amount, but “compelling users to form AI usage pathways.” As long as users become dependent during 7–10 days of high-frequency use, post-holiday retention may far exceed that of past internet products.

The data speaks: AI assistants are approaching the “mass application” threshold

Looking at existing data, the user scale of China’s AI assistants is no longer “experimental.”

According to QuestMobile and MoonFox data cited by Citi, as of December 2025:

Doubao MAU reached 227 million, solidly in first place.DeepSeek, Yuanbao, Tongyi Qianwen, and Wenxin Assistant have approximately 136 million, 41 million, 26 million, and 5 million MAU respectively.Doubao DAU has reached 70 million, with some AI assistants exceeding 100 minutes of average usage time per user.

What’s more noteworthy is that the proportion of web DAUs for several AI assistants has significantly increased, with Baidu’s Wenxin Assistant web usage rate reaching as high as 65%, indicating that AI is shifting from being “an app tool” to “a general entry point.”

This is precisely the key point Citi repeatedly stresses: AI assistant competition has already shifted from “model capability” to “who can become the default entry-point first.”

Will the “iPhone moment” truly come?

So, the question is: After the Spring Festival, will China’s AI assistants truly have their own “iPhone moment”?

Citi’s answer is measured but clear:

Spring Festival red envelopes will not directly determine the winnerBut it will be the first nationwide, real-user-density stress testWhether high DAU and high-frequency usage can be maintained after the holiday will be the key distinguishing line between a “tool-type AI” and a “platform-level AI”

From an investment preference standpoint, Citi ranks “traffic entry + ecosystem synergy” as: Tencent > Alibaba > Baidu, which also corresponds to recent stock price performance.

Conclusion: The red envelope is the starting point, not the end

Looking back, every generational leap in China’s internet has had a “mass-level ignition point”:

The WeChat red envelope in 2014 ushered in mobile paymentsThe short video subsidies of 2018 created a new paradigm for content distributionAnd the Spring Festival of 2026 may be seen as: the starting point for China’s AI assistants to move from “usable” to “indispensable.”

Red envelopes will disappear, but once usage habits are reshaped, the real competition has only just begun.

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The above highlights are from Wind Chaser Trading Desk.

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