Pinduoduo’s second-quarter results announcement, dated 24 August, uses the word “AI” zero times; it does not use “technology” either. The platform those pages describe has been testing natural-language AI search since March and launched it in May; when its AI companions began is not disclosed. Western retail treats the announcement as the asset and the feature as the follow-up; Pinduoduo kept the feature and declined the asset. The nearest its filing comes to the subject is “digital economy”, in the boilerplate.

The features themselves were never concealed. Pinduoduo’s AI companions sit inside Duoduo Orchard, its long-running rewards game, and chatting to them pays as everything in that channel pays. The same reporting frames this as catching up rather than leading: AI companions cannot replicate 砍一刀, the group-discount mechanic that runs on real social ties, not chat. An AI interactive drama and an AI fitting room arrived by the same door. AI search reached shoppers the same way, found by a trade reporter rather than announced. Shoppers met all of it without being told what it was.

The spending is filed where the vocabulary is not. Pinduoduo’s 2025 annual results put research and development at ¥16.5 billion, up 30 per cent, credited to staff costs and to bandwidth and servers. That document does not write “AI” either. A company can buy the machines without buying the sentence. Boards elsewhere buy both and expense the second one as strategy.

Elsewhere the sentence is the dearer item. FactSet counted “AI” on 337 of 498 S&P 500 earnings calls in the first quarter, the highest tally in a decade. Share prices at the companies that said it rose 12.7 per cent on average since 31 March; the silent ones managed 2.6. Widen the window to 31 December and swap the average for the median, and the order flips: AI-citing companies returned 5.5 per cent against 6.2 for the rest. Averages are where narratives get paid.

The word carries a price; the feature carries only a margin.

Rivals grasped this and named their assistants accordingly. A September survey of China’s AI shopping guides by Beike Finance, carried by Sina, lists Alibaba’s Qianwen, Meituan’s Xiaotuan and JD’s Jingyan. It puts Jingyan at nearly 80 million users in the first quarter, up more than 200 per cent. Pinduoduo’s entry in the same table reads “AI search”. That is a description, not a product, and no user figure has ever been published for it.

Anonymity has a cost, though not the one investors name. A survey of China’s agentic commerce race in The Next Web, published twelve days before the search story surfaced, credited Alibaba, JD and Meituan and did not mention Pinduoduo once. The omission was fair on the record available. Nothing in the disclosures invited a mention. Discipline that thorough writes a company out of its own race.

We reported in July that the silence was a decision rather than an absence. The firm had staffed a large-model team long before outsiders noticed. The August filing settles it. A quarter on, with rivals branding assistants and counting users, the vocabulary has not moved a word. Someone will eventually ask what the ¥16.5 billion research line bought. The answer exists; nobody at Pinduoduo has agreed to name it.