China's Lipstick King sold 100,000 AI memberships in 30 minutes

For the first time, AI token packages are a major Singles' Day category in China: top livestreamer Austin Li sold 100,000 monthly memberships to Alibaba's QwenWork office AI service within half an hour on a Taobao Live broadcast, a haul equal to about 2 trillion AI tokens.

Alibaba's Tmall has opened an AI Token Center selling consumer token packages from Alibaba Cloud, MiniMax, Moonshot AI and Z.AI, while JD.com added its own AI token section featuring DeepSeek, Z.AI and ByteDance's Volcano Engine. Alibaba says token-plan sales from October 1 to 20 jumped 450 percent from the previous month.

The twist is the salesman: Li earned the 'Lipstick King' name selling cosmetics by the truckload and had never sold an AI product before. On air he asked Alibaba's QwenWork chief whether AI could build a digital avatar of him to chat with fans around the clock — and analysts warn prepaid tokens could go stale fast as AI products change.