Beijing Unveils Policy to Boost AI Agents and Support the Token Economy
The Beijing Municipal Government has issued a new policy framework to accelerate the development of AI agents, specifically encouraging the growth of the "Token economy." The measures introduce financial subsidies like compute and token vouchers, alongside support for new business models such as Token-as-a-Service (TaaS). This policy marks a significant shift in government support from raw infrastructure to application-level AI efficiency and commercialization. By subsidizing tokens and computing power, Beijing aims to lower the entry barrier for startups and foster a robust AI agent ecosystem in China. The initiative promotes hardware-software co-design, including low-latency, high-throughput inference chips and heterogeneous computing to reduce inference costs. It also encourages financial institutions to develop specialized products for AI agent deployment and supports the creation of shared data loops to continuously train these agents.
## BACKGROUND
In large language models (LLMs), tokens are the basic units of data (like words or characters) processed by the AI, and they serve as the primary metric for pricing AI services. To help small and medium enterprises (SMEs) afford the high costs of AI development, Chinese municipal governments have previously issued "compute vouchers" to subsidize data center rentals.