Ernie Bot is the chatbot from Baidu, the Chinese search company, and it runs on Baidu's ERNIE family of language models. Invited testing began on March 16, 2023, and the service opened to the general public in China on August 31, 2023, after regulatory approval. Baidu has since released newer models under the ERNIE name, made the chatbot free to individual users in March 2025, and published open weights for the ERNIE 4.5 family on June 30, 2025.
Key takeaways
- Ernie Bot is a service; ERNIE is the model family behind it, and the two names are often mixed up.
- The March 16, 2023 debut used a recorded demonstration, and Baidu's Hong Kong shares fell by as much as 10 percent that day.
- Public release required approval, because China's rules on generative AI call for a security review before a service reaches the public.
- The ERNIE 4.5 weights are available under the Apache 2.0 license, but the Ernie Bot service itself is not open source.
- Claims that ERNIE models match or beat Western models are Baidu's own statements, and no independent check was found.
Timeline of Ernie Bot and the ERNIE models
The table lists dated events that were checked against news coverage or Baidu's own announcements. Later model names have moved quickly, so anything newer than the last row should be confirmed on Baidu's site.
| Date | Event | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| March 16, 2023 | Ernie Bot unveiled with a recorded demonstration; invited testing begins | News coverage |
| August 31, 2023 | Open to the public in China after approval by authorities | News coverage |
| October 17, 2023 | ERNIE 4.0 announced at the Baidu World conference in Beijing, with invited testing | News coverage |
| March 16, 2025 | ERNIE 4.5 and the reasoning model ERNIE X1 announced; Ernie Bot made free to individual users | Baidu press release |
| June 30, 2025 | ERNIE 4.5 family released with open weights under Apache 2.0 | Baidu blog post |
| November 13, 2025 | ERNIE 5.0 preview announced at Baidu World 2025 | Baidu press release |
A launch that fell short of expectations
Gulf News reported that Baidu chief executive Robin Li showed a recorded demonstration on March 16, 2023, instead of the live interaction many investors expected. The bot answered questions about the science fiction novel The Three-Body Problem and produced audio in two Chinese dialects. Baidu's Hong Kong-listed shares fell as much as 10 percent at one point and were down about seven percent by the afternoon. Other outlets gave different closing figures, so the size of the drop depends on the time of day measured.
Why public release waited until August
TechNode reported that Baidu made Ernie Bot publicly available on August 31, 2023, after approvals from Chinese authorities, and that a rule issued in July 2023 required companies to obtain a license before releasing generative AI models to the public. A wire report on ERNIE 4.0 carried by the Boston Globe in October 2023 added that China requires such companies to pass security reviews and to comply with government requests for technology and data. Users and businesses outside China should read this as a regulatory fact about the service's home market, not as a verdict on quality. The terms and data practices of a hosted chatbot are set in its own privacy policy, and that policy governs what happens to submitted text.
What ERNIE 4.5 and X1 were announced as
Baidu's March 16, 2025 press release described ERNIE 4.5 as a native multimodal foundation model and ERNIE X1 as a deep-thinking reasoning model able to use tools. It said both were free for individuals on the Ernie Bot website, and that the company had earlier planned to make the chatbot free from April 1. For developers, the release listed pricing on Baidu AI Cloud's Qianfan platform: ERNIE 4.5 from RMB 0.004 per thousand input tokens and RMB 0.016 per thousand output tokens, with ERNIE X1 listed as coming soon. Prices and plans change, so those numbers describe March 2025, not today.
The same release says ERNIE 4.5 outperforms GPT-4.5 on multiple benchmarks at one percent of the price, and that X1 matches DeepSeek R1 at half the price. These are statements by the seller. They have not been reproduced here, and benchmark results depend on which tests, prompts, and settings are used.
Open weights: what Baidu released on June 30, 2025
Baidu's ERNIE 4.5 blog post describes a family of 10 variants. They include mixture-of-experts models with 47 billion and three billion active parameters, a 0.3 billion dense model, and a vision-language model with 424 billion total parameters. The page states that all models are publicly accessible under the Apache License 2.0, which permits commercial use subject to its terms, and lists Hugging Face and the PaddlePaddle ERNIE repository on GitHub as places to find them. Open weights let outside researchers run and test the models. They do not by themselves reveal the training data, and the hosted Ernie Bot service remains Baidu's product.
Checklist for reading an ERNIE announcement
- Is the name for the chatbot service, a model family, or one model version?
- Is the date the announcement, the invited test, or the public release?
- Is a performance claim from the company or from an independent evaluation?
- Does a price refer to the consumer app, which can be free, or to the developer API?
- Are weights downloadable, and under which license?
FAQ
When was Ernie Bot released to the public?
August 31, 2023, in China, after Chinese authorities approved it. An invited-testing version had launched on March 16, 2023.
Is Ernie Bot free?
Baidu announced on March 16, 2025 that it was free to individual users on its website, ahead of an earlier plan for April 1. Terms may have changed since, so current conditions should be checked with Baidu.
Is Ernie Bot open source?
The service is not. Baidu published weights for the ERNIE 4.5 model family under Apache 2.0 on June 30, 2025. Whether later models, such as the ERNIE 5.0 preview, are open was not confirmed.
Does ERNIE match GPT-4?
Baidu said in October 2023 that ERNIE 4.0 was not inferior to GPT-4 in any aspect. That is the company's own assessment, and no independent comparison was found to confirm it.
Related reading
- The OpenAI chatbot explained
- GPT-3 as a chatbot engine
- Natural language generation in chatbots
- Building a chatbot for customer service
More in AI Tools and Industry.
Last verified: October 2026
Sources
- Baidu shares fall after disappointing AI chatbot debut, Gulf News, March 16, 2023
- Baidu opens Ernie Bot to public after regulatory approval, TechNode, August 31, 2023
- Chinese search engine company Baidu unveils Ernie 4.0 AI model, claims that it rivals GPT-4, Boston Globe (wire report), October 17, 2023
- Baidu Unveils ERNIE 4.5 and Reasoning Model ERNIE X1, Makes ERNIE Bot Free Ahead of Schedule, Baidu press release, March 16, 2025
- Announcing the open source release of the ERNIE 4.5 model family, Baidu ERNIE blog, June 30, 2025
- Baidu Unveils ERNIE 5.0 and a Series of AI Applications at Baidu World 2025, Baidu press release, November 13, 2025