CAICT Report: Large Model Prices Rebound Significantly, Token Prices Double Compared with the Second Half of Last Year, Average Daily Consumption Up 3-Fold

As large model technology iterates rapidly, token services have become a key node in the transition of technology to application. On October 23, the Institute of Artificial Intelligence of the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the Key Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence Large Models and Software and Hardware Evaluation of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the China Artificial Intelligence Industry Development Alliance jointly released the "Large Model Token Service Performance Monitoring Report." The report shows that token services are exhibiting a trend of rising volume and price, with domestic token prices doubling compared with the second half of last year, while volume growth reached 3 times. In June 2026, domestic average daily token consumption was about 500 trillion, nearly 4 times that of December 2025. More and more model-as-a-service platform vendors are supplying large model token services through public cloud APIs, and the lack of intuitive criteria for users to judge token service performance and the difficulty they face in model selection are the background for the report. After the price wars of the past two years, model service prices at home and abroad rose significantly in 2026: the normalized average price rose from 6.8 yuan in the second half of 2025 to 13.46 yuan this year, an increase of nearly one fold; however, foreign prices remain significantly higher than domestic ones, with the average normalized price of typical models released since 2026 at about 117.8 yuan.