ByteDance leads China with $4bn in AI revenue, breaks up Lark

ByteDance now makes about $4bn a year from AI, the largest figure any Chinese company has publicly claimed, the South China Morning Post reported. To push that lead, the company behind TikTok is folding Lark , its Slack-style workplace app, into the teams behind its Doubao chatbot and its cloud business.

Lark's product team will merge into the Doubao group under Zhao Qi. Its sales and support staff move to Volcano Engine, ByteDance's cloud arm, to sell AI models and software to businesses, while its engineers join Flow, a division focused on AI apps.

Most of China's labs give their best models away to win users and are only now working out how to charge for them. A firm that can already book $4bn has a head start.

ByteDance said the goal was "stronger AI product competitiveness and customer service capabilities." The restructure is one piece of a broader push, with spending across every layer of AI at once — from frontier models and its Seedance video generator to infrastructure and chips.

The $4bn puts ByteDance ahead of Chinese rivals DeepSeek , Moonshot and Alibaba , but remains tiny beside US leaders OpenAI and Anthropic , which each run at many times that. The figure says more about the gap with US AI than about any Chinese lead.