HANGZHOU, China--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jun 17, 2026--
Ant Group's 2025 Sustainability Report disclosed a record R&D investment of USD 5.17 billion (RMB 35.03 billion) in 2025—the fifth straight year of growth—alongside AI-powered green computing breakthroughs that contributed to cutting operational carbon emissions by 55.32% year-on-year. These milestones reflect Ant Group's commitment to sustainable AI development.
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“Does technological advancement necessarily lead to shared prosperity? The answer lies not in the technology itself, but in the people who use it,” wrote Eric Jing, Chairman of Ant Group, and Cyril Han, CEO of Ant Group in their joint address. “Making AI a driver for shared prosperity—this is our answer to the age of AI, and our shared commitment to the future."
Record AI Investment Drives Three Core Priorities
According to Ant Group’s 2023 and 2025 Sustainability Reports, the company has been increasing annual R&D spending since 2021. These investments cover major areas including foundational AI models, AI-powered payment & everyday services, and AI-driven health solutions.
AI Health App Bridging the Medical Resource Gap
As of February 2026, Ant Group's AI-native health app, AQ, has reached a major milestone — surpassing 100 million total users. This achievement builds on AQ’s rapidly expanding health ecosystem. By late 2025, the app had connected users with services of over 5,000 medical institutions across China, successfully driving the AI integration of 301 partner facilities.
To enhance accessible care, AQ collaborated with more than 2,000 Chinese physicians to launch “AI Doctor Agents.” These AI-powered virtual doctors are trained on the specific clinical expertise of individual specialists. The doctor agents offer free, reliable guidance for daily health questions, having served over 6.9 million users in 2025.
Next Generation AI Payment and Everyday Services
On June 16, 2026, Alipay launched a major AI agent upgrade ("Ah Bao" in Mandarin), enabling its one billion users to find services more easily and execute daily tasks with the help of its AI agent interface.
In May 2026, Alipay unveiled a full-stack AI payment infrastructure featuring consumer products AI Pay and AI Wallet, alongside business solutions including AI payment processing and Token Pay. At its foundation lies China's first Agentic Commerce Trust Protocol, developed with partners, supported by an intelligent security system that safeguards every AI-driven transaction. Together, these technologies form the trust and transaction infrastructure essential for scaling the agentic economy.
By May 2026, Alipay AI Pay surpassed 300 million transactions, establishing itself as the first commercially scaled AI-native payment infrastructure globally.
As agentic commerce gains momentum in China, Alipay’s AI payment services have expanded across diverse use cases. These include AI agents integrated into apps and mini programs for retailers like Luckin Coffee; AI-powered smart glasses from Rokid; consumer applications such as Alibaba’s Qwen; smart cockpit systems; OpenClaw-type AI agents, and AI development platforms including Coze and Qoder; AI model companies like MiniMax and Stepfun; and One Person Companies (OPCs).
Advancements in Foundation Model Research
In 2025, Ant Group open-sourced the Ling series foundational models, delivering high-performance models at lower computing costs. Its latest evolution features the release of Ling-2.6-1T, a trillion-parameter language model designed for complex, real-world tasks such as coding and multi-step workflows.
Moreover, Robbyant, Ant Group’s embodied AI company, launched the “Evolution of Embodied AI Week” initiative in January 2026 and open-sourced a full stack of AI models for the physical world. Among them is LingBot-World, a world model that achieves industry-leading performance in video quality, dynamic fidelity, long-term consistency, and interactivity.
Green Computing Breakthrough Delivers Measurable Impact
Following the principle of “achieving the same business outcomes with less computing power”, Ant Group's self-developed Theta AI infrastructure enables substantial efficiency gains through optimized model distribution and intelligent scheduling:
Clean Energy Transition Accelerates
In 2025, Ant Group achieved operational carbon neutrality for the fifth consecutive year, with Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions cut by 55.32% compared with the baseline year of 2020. Through refined clean energy trading and allocation strategies, Ant Group increased clean energy use in its data centers to 65% in 2025.
"We believe that the true value of technology lies not in fleeting trends, but in genuine needs, steadfast commitment, and human well-being. How can technology reach everyone who truly needs it? With unwavering resilience, we will continue to use technology to bring small and beautiful changes to the world,” wrote Sabrina Peng, Chief Sustainability Officer of Ant Group.
Ant Group's 2025 Sustainability Report is available in Chinese here, an English version will be available in the coming months.
About Ant Group
Ant Group is a global digital technology provider and the operator of Alipay, a leading internet services platform in China, connecting over one billion users to more than 10,000 types of consumer services from partners. Through innovative products and solutions powered by AI, blockchain and other technologies, Ant Group supports partners across industries to thrive through digital transformation in an ecosystem for inclusive and sustainable development. For more information, visit www.antgroup.com
Progress of Ant Group's main AI initiatives
Ant Group has been ramping up R&D investment in AI
WASHINGTON (AP) — Most Americans believe civil liberties like the right to vote are under threat, according to a new AP-NORC poll, while also continuing to agree that the rights expressed in the nation’s founding documents are still core to American identity.
The survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds that most Americans across demographics believe the right to vote, the right to free speech and freedom of religion are integral to the country. But they were more divided on the importance of the right to bear arms, and few — about one-third or less — saw those rights as safe from threats.
The survey, which was conducted April 16-20 — before the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that winnowed a section of the Voting Rights Act — highlights an enduring consensus among Americans that personal freedoms are vital to the country's national identity. But it also reveals deep anxieties about the nation’s trajectory on the cusp of a summer filled with celebrations of the country's semi-quincentennial birthday.
“Our idea of rights has been very consistent in this country until the last few years,” said Louise Rochon, 85, of Connecticut. “Now, they’re all under threat. Every single last one of them.”
About 9 in 10 Americans say the right to vote is “extremely” or “very” important to the United States’ identity, the poll found. About the same proportion of Americans consider freedom of speech to be highly important to the country’s identity. Meanwhile, about 8 in 10 Americans consider freedom of religion to be core to the national identity, while about 6 in 10 Americans consider the right to keep or bear arms as highly important to the nation’s identity.
But many in the country see those same principles as imperiled today. About two-thirds of Americans view the right to vote as under some threat, with about one-third saying voting rights are under “major threat” while about 3 in 10 said they faced a “minor threat.” Only about one-third of Americans said voting rights faced “no threat at all.”
Additionally, nearly half of Americans say freedom of speech is under major threat, followed by about 3 in 10 who said the same about gun rights and religious freedom.
The country is going “down the drain,” said Tracy Gonzales, an independent from San Antonio, Texas. Americans of all stripes, she said, have “thrown religion to the side at the moment” and allowed for other civil liberties to be eroded amid fierce debates over immigration and the economy.
“Given everything going on with our president, you really don’t have time to think of anything else,” said Gonzales, 37, of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdowns. “There are so many other crimes that are being committed and people that actually need help, and you’re focused on the ones that are trying to get it together.”
The poll's results also surfaced complicated opinions about democracy and identity among Black Americans. Those are likely rooted, at least in part, in the country's history of denying voting rights and full citizenship to people of African descent for centuries.
Black Americans are less likely than white Americans to say the right to vote is “extremely” or “very important” to American identity, with about three-quarters agreeing with the sentiment compared to about 9 in 10 white Americans.
But about 4 in 10 Black Americans say that the right to vote is facing a “major” threat in the country today, higher than any other racial group.
“You cannot feel like you are a total and full part of the American experiment unless you have the right to vote,” said Antonio Williams, a school administrator in Dallas, Texas, who is Black. “And African Americans didn’t fully get to enjoy the right to vote until about 60 years ago, and I feel like it’s under threat right now."
Independents and younger adults are less likely than Americans overall to say voting and freedom of speech are central to American identity.
“My age group has grown up a lot more with social media as part of their existence in life and the microcosms that that creates in politics,” said Julian Goodwin-Ferris, 28, a professional dancer from New Jersey.
“I think we feel more like our voice doesn’t matter as much because it feels like we’ve grown up with our rights sort of being more ignored,” said Goodwin-Ferris.
Americans at times diverged along partisan lines in their view of the threats to rights, with Democrats seeing a greater threat to freedom of speech, while Republicans were more worried about the right to keep and bear arms.
While Democrats and Republicans are similarly likely to say freedom of speech is at least “very important" to the nation's identity, about 6 in 10 Democrats say freedom of speech is facing a “major threat” compared to about 4 in 10 independents and roughly one-third of Republicans.
Similarly, while most Americans believe the right to bear arms is at least “very” important to the nation's identity, about 8 in 10 Republicans agree with that sentiment, compared to only about 4 in 10 Democrats. About half of independents shared that view. And about 4 in 10 Republicans found that the right to bear firearms was under threat, an increase from October 2025 not reflected among either Democrats or independents.
"We have the Bill of Rights for a reason," said Nuri Simmons, a warehouse worker in New York and a registered Democrat. Simmons, 31, said that threats to different rights “bleed into each other” and that while he was most concerned about threats to voting rights today, he understood that others may feel differently.
“Like when people try to bring some gun control into it, I think some people look at that as an attack on their rights. I guess that all depends on your politics," he said.
The AP-NORC poll of 2,596 adults was conducted April 16-20 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 2.6 percentage points.
People cast their vote during D.C. primary election at Shepard Park Elementary, Tuesday, June 16, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)
The U.S. Capitol and National Mall are seen as the set up for the America 250 celebration, in Washington, Saturday, June 13, 2026. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)
