Alibaba AI Agent Undercuts Anthropic by 50% in E-commerce Tasks

Alibaba claims its e-commerce AI agent has gained 60,000 paying users in five months, offering a 50% cost advantage over OpenAI and Anthropic for shopping tasks. The claim is unverified and based on Alibaba's own data. This signals intensifying competition in vertical AI agents, potentially pressuring pricing for general-purpose models.