China's 'Lipstick King' Sells AI for One Cent This Double 11

"Can you make me an AI clone that chats with the girls 24 hours a day?" Li Jiaqi asked his guest.

The livestreamer known as China's "Lipstick King," who once sold 15,000 lipsticks in five minutes, was pitching AI office help this time. On his Double 11 livestream on November 2, about 100,000 QwenWork personal monthly memberships sold in roughly half an hour for 0.01 yuan each. Together, they represented about 2 trillion tokens in usage allowances, according to the QwenWork team.

His guest, Alibaba vice president and QwenWork chief executive Chen Yusen, replied that "AI can't replace Li Jiaqi." He said he would rather help fans with everyday tasks so they could leave work on time and have more time for pets and family.

Viewers urged Li to put the tokens on sale, with some 50,000 memberships sold in the first 10 minutes. The monthly card normally costs 28 yuan. Tokens are units AI models use to measure the information they process.

Li explained the 500 monthly credits in terms viewers could picture: about 50 presentations, 160 weekly reports or 250 spreadsheets. Li is a keen angler, so Chen also had the AI make him a global fishing map on the spot, Xinhua Finance reported.

The pitch targets a gap between knowing about AI and using it for work. China had more than 700 million generative AI users by the first half of 2026, according to the China Internet Network Information Center. But while 76 percent used AI to answer questions, 32.5 percent used it for work summaries, meeting notes or presentations. The figures describe types of use, rather than how frequently people use AI.

Getting people to pay is a bigger hurdle. Only 9.8 percent of AI users paid for AI tools, according to a May survey by Tencent Research that Xinhua Finance cited. A livestream turns an abstract technology into a concrete deal, and Li's audience is used to buying on impulse.

Li's stream is part of a wider shift onto shopping platforms. Tmall set up tokens as their own promotional category this year, with Zhipu, MiniMax, Moonshot AI and Alibaba Cloud opening stores. On October 20, the first day of Double 11 sales, token sales on Taobao jumped 450 percent from the previous month, the Beijing News reported, citing Tmall data.

Not every heavy user wants a monthly plan, though. An AI video producer told Xinhua he prefers to buy as needed, because fixed allowances don't match his changing workload.

The one-cent deal also comes with conditions. It is limited to first-time subscribers, the Economic Observer reported. Under a promotion that started on November 1, standard mode doesn't use up credits, but images, audio and video still do, and basic users may have to queue at busy times.

Cui Lili, deputy director of the Institute of Digital Economy at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, told China Newsweek that the livestream's short-term role was market education. Whether it pays off, she said, depends on how many buyers actually start using the service.