Using ERNIE 5.1 on Baidu Qianfan

Quick Start

1. 1
   Create an account at Baidu Qianfan and generate an API key.
2. 2
   Use the Baidu Qianfan SDK or REST API to call ernie-5.1 — see the documentation for request format.
3. 3
   You'll be billed $0.59/1M input, $2.65/1M output tokens. See full pricing.

Code Examples

About Baidu Qianfan

Baidu Qianfan provides native hosted access to Baidu's ERNIE model lineup, including ERNIE 5.1, through model service APIs and the Qianfan console. The platform documents OpenAI-compatible access patterns, model lists, rate limits, and token-based pricing for online inference.

Baidu Qianfan is Baidu Intelligent Cloud's foundation model and Agent development platform, providing hosted API access to ERNIE and Qianfan models for text generation, reasoning, multimodal understanding, embeddings, and agent workflows.

Pricing on Baidu Qianfan

Capabilities

About ERNIE 5.1

ERNIE 5.1 is Baidu's fifth-generation flagship language model, officially released May 9, 2026. Achieved via disaggregated fully-asynchronous reinforcement learning and scaled agentic post-training, it delivers leading performance at approximately 6% of the pre-training compute cost of comparable models — with roughly one-third the total parameters and half the active parameters of ERNIE 5.0. ERNIE 5.1 ranks #4 globally and #1 among Chinese models on the LMArena Search leaderboard (score: 1,223), with standout performance in legal reasoning, mathematics (AIME26: 99.6), and business domains. API model ID: ernie-5.1. Context: 128K tokens; max output: 65,536 tokens.