On July 2, 2026, Meituan issued an internal directive that imposed sweeping restrictions on the utilization of the Doubao large model. The directive mandated that each business unit conduct self-assessments and transition to alternative models, such as LongCat and DeepSeek. For teams unable to make this transition, detailed justifications outlining the reasons and necessity for continued Doubao usage were required for executive approval.

This move followed an earlier decision in April, when Meituan had already limited the use of Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen model, making its deployment contingent upon high-level authorization. Since 2023, Meituan has been actively developing the LongCat large model, which has since been seamlessly integrated across various business operations. Recently, the company unveiled the trillion-parameter LongCat-2.0 model and released it as open-source software, thereby establishing a robust and diversified AI capability framework.