China's dominant search engine and AI technology company. Founded in 2000 by Robin Li, headquartered in Beijing.
On June 5-8, 2026, the US Department of Defense added Baidu, Inc. to its Section 1260H list of 'Chinese Military Companies operating in the United States,' citing indirect affiliation with SASAC and military-civil fusion contribution through MIIT ties. Baidu called the designation 'entirely baseless.' The listing bars the Defense Department from contracting directly with Baidu immediately, and from procuring its products/services through third parties starting June 2027.
On April 1, 2026 a system-wide software failure caused Baidu's Apollo Go robotaxi fleet to freeze mid-route across Wuhan, trapping passengers inside stopped vehicles, blocking traffic in a high-traffic market, and causing secondary collisions involving the stranded cars. Baidu did not respond to media requests for comment during the incident and its customer service reportedly gave misleading information about technician arrival times; some passengers said they were charged full fares despite the service failure. Local police attributed the outage to a 'system failure' but Baidu did not publicly disclose a root cause. The incident renewed scrutiny of safety oversight for autonomous vehicles operating without human safety drivers in one of China's most permissive robotaxi markets, and comes as Baidu pursues international expansion of the service.
Baidu released its ERNIE 4.5 large language model as open source in June 2025, making advanced AI technology freely available to developers and researchers.
Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) found that Baidu's ERNIE Bot AI chatbot provided responses aligned with Chinese Communist Party propaganda on sensitive topics, including denying Tiananmen Square events.
A Baidu internal database containing personal information of hundreds of millions of users was found exposed online, including search queries, GPS coordinates, and device information.
Wei Zexi, a 21-year-old college student, died after receiving unproven cancer treatment found through Baidu's promoted search results. Investigation revealed Baidu accepted payments from unlicensed medical providers for top search placement.
Baidu routinely censors politically sensitive search results including content about Tiananmen Square, Tibet independence, Falun Gong, and other topics deemed sensitive by Chinese authorities.