ByteDance unveiled its next-generation AI model family, Doubao 2.1 Pro, at the 2026 Volcano Engine FORCE conference. The company aims to enhance enterprise AI deployment in China and globally with this launch and the broader Seed 2.1 lineup.
The Seed 2.1 model family includes two variants, Pro and Turbo, focusing on agent-capable enterprise productivity. Doubao 2.1 Pro features upgrades in coding, long-chain agent task execution, and multimodal understanding. It achieved leading scores on Terminal Bench 2.1, SWE-Pro, and SciCode for code generation, and currently leads OSWorld, MobileWorld, and MMMU-Pro for agent and multimodal tasks. ByteDance claims Doubao 2.1 Pro outperforms Claude Opus 4.6 across several evaluation metrics.
Pricing for Doubao 2.1 Pro is set at 6 yuan per million input tokens and 30 yuan per million output tokens, with cache-hit pricing as low as 1.2 yuan. Volcano Engine stated that the total cost of ownership for Doubao 2.1 Pro is nearly 80 percent lower than for Claude Opus 4.6. A Turbo variant is available at half the price, targeting high-frequency enterprise scenarios.
As of June, daily token calls for the Doubao model family exceed 180 trillion, showing over tenfold growth within the past year. Research firm IDC reported that Volcano Engine commands a 49.5 percent market share in China’s public cloud Model-as-a-Service sector. More than 1.1 million enterprises and individual developers utilize the Volcano Ark model service, with 200 companies each making over one trillion annual token calls.
The conference also previewed Seedance 2.5, a video generation model capable of creating 30-second clips from up to 50 multimodal reference inputs. Seedance 2.5 is currently in global enterprise beta, with general availability expected in early July. Additionally, ByteDance showcased Seedream 5.0 Pro for image generation and Seed-Audio 1.0 for multi-character audio synthesis. New developer tools were launched, including Ark CLI for simplified agent deployment and the ArkClaw enterprise agent workbench.
