China regulates AI through binding law. Three NPC statutes set the floor, CAC-led measures bind every algorithm, deepfake and generative service, and the 2026 frontier rules reach AI agents, companions and humanoid robots. This site maps that layered system by force and tracks the court cases shaping it.
Twenty-five instruments, stacked by force and listed the way a statute book would list them. The binding stack has three storeys: NPC statute at the base, CAC-led measures on top, frontier rules at the edge. Tap a row for what it does and where it is published.
Network security obligations, critical information infrastructure protection and data localisation. Every later AI and data rule rests on it.
Source ↗Data classification with tiered security duties and export controls, up to "core state data" under the strictest regime.
Source ↗The comprehensive privacy statute: informed consent, access and deletion rights, and limits on processing. It governs the personal data behind AI systems.
Source ↗The first binding national rules anywhere for public-facing generative AI: content compliance, training-data quality and provider accountability for every generative service offered to the Chinese public.
The first dedicated rules for recommendation algorithms: transparency, user opt-outs, anti-addiction duties and algorithm filing for high-impact services.
Source ↗Deepfake and synthetic-media rules: clear labelling, real-name authentication and content review.
Source ↗Bans facial recognition as the sole verification method and cameras in private spaces. Requires privacy impact assessments, and registration once 100,000 identities are stored.
Source pendingVisible labels plus embedded metadata labels on all AI-generated text, images, audio, video and virtual scenes, backed by mandatory national standard GB 45438-2025.
Source ↗A three-tier ethics review for AI research and development, mandatory where AI can mobilise public opinion, decide with high autonomy or integrate deeply with humans. Adds algorithm audits for gig-economy platforms.
Source pendingThe first dedicated rules for AI companions and emotional-interaction services that simulate human personality, thinking patterns and communication styles.
Source pendingThe first national framework for autonomous AI agents: governance principles, nineteen application sectors and safety red lines. A policy instrument, so it directs rather than sanctions.
Source pendingA national standard system across the humanoid-robot industrial chain, in six domains from brain-like computing to safety and ethics.
Source pendingAlgorithm transparency, explainability and fairness testing for credit scoring, insurance underwriting and investment AI.
Source pendingValidation requirements, physician oversight, liability frameworks and patient consent for clinical AI and medical imaging. Accreditation in practice depends on compliance.
Source pendingAge-appropriate use policies, academic integrity standards, teacher training and student data protection for AI in schools and universities.
Source pendingThe first national framework for measuring and verifying AI systems, so that performance is measurable, comparable and traceable across fourteen sectors.
Source pendingThe forthcoming comprehensive statute, expected to consolidate the administrative measures under one risk-tiered law. A scholarly draft circulated in 2024.
Draft: no enacted text yetRules for AI avatars and virtual humans: biometric consent for likeness replication, personality rights, and a ban on virtual relatives for minors.
Draft for commentChina's own eleven-point initiative from the 2023 Belt and Road Forum, implemented by the thirteen-point Global AI Governance Action Plan announced at WAIC Shanghai in July 2025, alongside a proposal for a World AI Cooperation Organization headquartered in Shanghai.
Source ↗The grouping's first standalone leaders-level AI document, adopted at the Rio summit. China is a founding member, so it applies fully.
Source ↗The first global standard on AI ethics, adopted by all UNESCO member states including China. China has not published a completed UNESCO readiness assessment.
Source ↗The first summit-level declaration on frontier-AI safety. China is on the official signatory list of 28 countries plus the EU.
Source ↗The statement on inclusive and sustainable AI. China signed; the US and UK declined.
Source ↗Annexed to the Osaka leaders' declaration and drawn from the OECD AI Principles. China backs them as a G20 member; it is not an OECD adherent.
Source ↗Adopted by consensus with the Pact for the Future; China did not dissociate. Shared commitments on digital and AI governance.
Source ↗The map ranks instruments by force. This view adds a second question: does an instrument set out principles or prescriptions? In China the crowded corner is binding and prescriptive. Tap any marker.
Tap a marker
The binding and prescriptive corner is the crowded one: the CAC-led measures put force and detail together, service by service. The sector guidance sits just left of the binding line, nonbinding in form but treated as obligatory. Dashed markers are drafts; the National AI Law would consolidate the whole stack into one statute.
A running record of Chinese decisions where AI is central to the dispute: the first copyright in an AI-generated image, the first AI voice-cloning judgment, the first generative-AI provider held liable for its outputs, and the first criminal conviction of chatbot developers for what their model said.
Grouped by what the dispute is about. Tap a case for the facts, the legal basis, and the holding. Case numbers from secondary reporting are flagged in the entries.
The decisions rest mainly on the Copyright Law, the Civil Code's personality-rights articles (990, 1019, 1023) and the Criminal Law, with the internet courts of Beijing, Guangzhou and Hangzhou doing most of the doctrinal work. The CAC's AI-specific measures enter as a duty-of-care yardstick rather than a cause of action. As of mid-2026 no published judgment yet applies the 2025 Labeling Measures.
Compiled July 2026 from published judgments, court-released typical cases and credible legal reporting, with status noted per case. A record of reported proceedings, not legal advice.
China grants copyright in human-directed AI images and walks AI patents through examination, so its output side is strongly accommodating. The one open question is training data, where a fair-use signal exists in the case law but not yet in statute.
The AI-IP Index reads a country on two questions that usually get folded together. Accommodation asks how far the law will go to protect intellectual property that a machine helped produce. Institution asks how much administrative machinery sits behind that law: its guidance, its international submissions, its disclosure duties.
A country can be generous on paper and have built almost nothing, or cautious and highly organised, so the two are scored apart and reported as a pair. Each rests on three questions, scored 0, 0.5 or 1.
How far the law will protect intellectual property that a machine helped make.
How much administrative machinery sits behind that law.
The scale runs the same way on both axes: 0 is the open or developed end, 1 is the restrictive or absent one, and 0.5 sits between for anything conditional or untested. Read as a pair, the two scores show whether AI-assisted work can be protected here, and whether the office has said so in writing.
Within each axis the three questions carry equal weight. That is a deliberate choice, not an oversight. An AI developer might reasonably value freedom to train above patent inventorship, but weighting is where indices lose their credibility, so the score stays a flat mean and the choice is stated in the open. Each cell also cites a statute section, a case or an office page, so any single score can be challenged without disputing the rest.
Two positions are worth naming. A country can be open on the law but thin on machinery, an open-but-undeveloped stance that bets on ambiguity. Or it can be restrictive on rights yet run an active office, a restrictive-but-developed stance that reflects a settled policy choice rather than a gap. The pair of scores tells those two apart where a single ranking would blur them.
A rubric is only as good as the results it produces on cases where the answer is already known. These three jurisdictions sit outside this series and are scored with the same six questions, as a check. Their law is the best documented anywhere, so if the scale puts them where the law actually sits, the scale is doing its job. They are reference points, not editions.
Firm judicial settlement at both poles and the weakest statutory position on training. The courts have closed the door on AI inventors and AI authors, while everything on training rides on unresolved fair-use litigation. There is no per se duty to declare AI use in a filing, only a candour duty that bites where the use is material.
Thaler v. Vidal, 43 F.4th 1207 (Fed. Cir. 2022); Thaler v. Perlmutter (D.C. Cir. 2025), cert. denied 2 Mar 2026; Bartz v. Anthropic (N.D. Cal. 2025); USPTO revised inventorship guidance, 90 Fed. Reg. 54636 (28 Nov 2025); 89 Fed. Reg. 58128 (17 Jul 2024); 89 Fed. Reg. 25609 (11 Apr 2024).
The most permissive statutory position on training and the strongest transparency duty in force, sitting over an authorship question no court has answered. Read the label carefully: training and transparency run through EU law, but patents run through the EPO under the European Patent Convention, which is not an EU institution and covers 39 states.
Directive (EU) 2019/790, arts. 3 and 4; Regulation (EU) 2024/1689, art. 53(1)(c) and (d); EPO J 8/20 (2021); EPO Guidelines G-II 3.3.1 (2026 edition); Infopaq C-5/08; Painer C-145/10.
Liberal on patents since the Supreme Court abandoned the Aerotel test in February 2026, conservative on copyright, and currently thin on AI-specific machinery after the dedicated AI examination guidance was withdrawn. Section 9(3) nominally protects a work with no human author for 50 years, the widest AI-output right on paper, but no court has ever applied it to generative AI.
CDPA 1988 ss. 9(3), 12(7), 29A, 178; Thaler v Comptroller-General [2023] UKSC 49; Comptroller-General v Emotional Perception AI [2026] UKSC 3; UKIPO practice notice, 14 Jul 2026; Data (Use and Access) Act 2025 ss. 135 to 137.
The check earned its keep twice. The untested rule held: section 9(3) of the UK Copyright Act reads like the widest AI-output right anywhere, yet because no court has applied it to generative AI it scores as untested rather than open, which is the correct answer and the one a headline reading would miss. The check also exposed a limit worth stating. The Institution axis measures AI-specific machinery, not general office capacity, so a long-established office can score poorly when it has withdrawn its AI guidance and imposes no disclosure duty. Read that axis as what an office has built for AI, nothing wider.
Each row below carries the test we applied and the finding behind the score, with a source. The rationale, not the number, is the point.
Scores verified 16 July 2026, against AIP Index codebook v1.0. A score is only true as of its date.
What we look forA granted patent or a clearly workable examination route, not merely a silent statute.
The findingCNIPA's December 2024 guidelines walk AI-related inventions through examination with a human named as inventor, and the office grants on that basis. A workable, applied rule.
What we look forProtection applied where human choices shape the work, and refusal of purely machine output.
The findingCourts from Beijing to Changshu and Wuhan protect human-directed AI images where the prompter's choices show original expression. The rule is applied, not theoretical.
What we look forA statutory or judicial mining lane. Silence scores against the miner, since the reserved-rights default governs.
The findingThere is no statutory mining exception, but the Hangzhou Ultraman appeal said training on copyrighted works can be fair absent intent to plagiarise or market harm. An emerging judicial approach, not settled law, and iQIYI v. MiniMax will test it.
What we look forA traceable, substantive submission on the record, not bare membership.
The findingChina and CNIPA are documented active participants in the WIPO Conversation on IP and Frontier Technologies.
What we look forA standalone AI examination text, not AI handled quietly under general practice.
The findingCNIPA has published dedicated AI patent examination guidelines, a rare piece of formal office-level guidance on AI.
What we look forA mandatory declaration inside the filing, not a proposal or an informal request.
The findingCNIPA's AI patent guidelines require the training datasets and training process to be disclosed in the specification, a training-data disclosure inside the filing, framed for sufficiency rather than provenance.
The founding four, Li v. Liu, Dreamwriter and the two Ultraman rulings, live on the Cases tab under copyright and authorship. These are the AI-IP decisions beyond them.
An image made with Midjourney and refined in Photoshop was protected, and defendants who copied it into advertisements and a three-dimensional installation infringed. The second Chinese court to protect AI-generated imagery.
The first Chinese refusal of copyright in AI output: butterfly-chair images lacked sufficient human input, and prompts themselves are not copyrightable. Protection tracks the human contribution, not the tool.
Copyright can subsist in AI images, but the claimant must evidence the creative effort: prompt records and the selection and modification process. The doctrine matures from whether to how to prove it.
An AI one-click video app that cut and spliced episodes of the drama Joy of Life and induced users to generate and spread infringing clips was held liable for RMB 800,000. A case about an AI tool infringing a drama's rights, not about protecting AI output.
The first suit by a Chinese video platform against an AI developer over unauthorized use of films and shows for model training, plus infringing outputs. Still pending as of mid-2026; the decision will test the Hangzhou training-can-be-fair dicta against a live claim.
CNIPA rejected the AI-as-inventor application and upheld the rejection on re-examination, a decision featured among its top re-examination cases. The inventor's administrative suit sits at the Beijing IP Court with no reported judgment as of mid-2026.
Method. Six questions, three per axis, scored 0, 0.5 or 1 against AIP Index codebook v1.0. The three questions in each axis are weighted equally by choice, and the two axes are reported as a pair, never blended into one number. Every score cites a statute, case or office page, carries a verified date, and records its direction of travel apart from the level. Positions are editorial judgements read from primary law and office practice, not official scores. WIPO's public catalogue of IP-office AI initiatives does not score jurisdictions on this basis, so the readings here come straight from the source law. Not legal advice.
China regulates AI the other way round from most of the region. Its neighbours steer AI with voluntary guidance while binding duties come only from general law; in China the AI-specific rules are the binding ones, issued measure by measure as each technology arrived: algorithms in 2022, deepfakes and generative AI in 2023, biometrics and labeling in 2025, agents and companions in 2026.
The site does two things: it maps that layered system as an enforceability spectrum, from NPC statute down to sector guidance, and it tracks the court rulings where AI is central, a docket that includes several world firsts. The domestic instrument set follows the China AI Law Explorer's inventory of official sources, extended with China's verified international commitments; case entries are drawn from published judgments and court-released typical cases.
The structure is easy to hold in your head: three NPC statutes at the base, CAC-led measures on top, frontier rules at the edge, and a draft National AI Law that would pull all of it into one statute.
Know of a Chinese ruling or proceeding where AI is central? Send a source link; it will be reviewed before publishing.
Submit a caseChina is consolidating. The measure-by-measure approach built a dense stack of binding rules, and the draft National AI Law is expected to pull them under one NPC statute with risk-tiered classification. The 2026 frontier rules show the pattern continuing at the edge: agents, companions, humanoid robots and virtual humans each get their own instrument as the technology lands.
The internet courts in Beijing, Guangzhou and Hangzhou keep producing first rulings, and judges have started reading the CAC measures as a standard of care rather than a regulator's text alone. This site keeps the map and the record current, so the consolidation is easy to follow.