Across China's technology sector, a quiet but consequential transformation is underway: companies like ByteDance and Alibaba have begun issuing AI tokens as a form of internal corporate currency, making artificial intelligence consumption measurable, budgeted, and tied to employee performance. Driven by a fierce price war — punctuated by DeepSeek's dramatic 75% price cut — AI has crossed the threshold from specialized tool to everyday infrastructure. In this transitional moment, the token economy serves less as a permanent system than as a bridge, training a generation of workers to think of A