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DCC · DATA COMPLIANCE CHINA China data law, for overseas counsel.
§ DOMAIN · AI GOVERNANCE

AI Governance.

人工智能治理

Rules and standards for generative AI services, deep synthesis, content labeling, and AI ethics in China.

[Editor to fill: 200-word domain overview.]

§ LAWS IN THIS DOMAIN

The legal corpus.

6 laws.

§ BRIEFS

In this domain.

7 briefs.

  • § 01 · AI-GOVERNANCE

    Zhu Xiaofeng — Who Pays When GenAI Causation Is Unclear? Applying Civil Code Article 1254 by Analogy

    Zhu Xiaofeng (Central University of Finance and Economics Law School) takes on the GenAI causation black hole — when a personal-information harm clearly arises from a GenAI service but specific causation among model designer, model provider, model user, and data provider cannot be established, who pays? Zhu's structural answer: when conventional construction-element-analysis and Article 998 interest-balancing both fail (and they do), apply Civil Code Article 1254's 'unclear-causation' rule by analogy — the same rule used for falling-object-from-building cases. The doctrinal scaffolding: communication-safety theory, gain-and-risk allocation theory, causation proof + harm prevention. Critically: each potential injurer compensates the full damage; among themselves, allocation is proportional, with judges determining specific amounts case-by-case. Highly relevant for multinationals deploying GenAI in China — the proposed framework restructures the operating liability surface.

    ai-governance · genai · personal-information
  • § 02 · AI-AGENTS

    Mapping the AI Agent Risk Surface — A Ten-Category Taxonomy Under China's New 智能体新规

    China's Cyberspace Administration jointly issued the Implementation Opinions on Standardized Application and Innovation Development of AI Agents (the '智能体新规' or 'Agent Rules') on May 8, 2026 — the first dedicated regulatory document on AI agents anywhere in the world. This DCC brief works through the ten-category risk taxonomy that practitioners are now using to map the agent attack surface: goal hijacking, tool misuse, identity/permission abuse, supply-chain compromise, unintended code execution, memory and context poisoning, inter-agent communication insecurity, cascade failures, human-machine trust exploitation, and rogue agents. With the agent risk mapped, the brief works the legal-liability vector: how each risk maps to administrative, civil, and criminal exposure under existing PIPL, CSL, Anti-Unfair Competition, and trade-secret regimes. Closes with the Guangzhou Internet Court's recent dual-authorization ruling against an open-source agent that bypassed a chat platform's risk controls — the first Chinese case to articulate the dual-authorization principle for AI agents accessing third-party platforms.

    ai-agents · ai-governance · genai
  • § 03 · AI-AGENTS

    Operationalizing AI Agent Governance — A Ten-Step Internal Control Framework

    Part 2 of DCC's brief on the Chinese Agent Rules (《智能体规范应用与创新发展实施意见》, May 2026). After mapping the ten-category risk taxonomy in Part 1, this brief works through the ten-step internal governance framework practitioners are now building to operationalize agent compliance: cross-functional governance organization + agent asset inventory; use-case admission and classification (L1 read-only / L2 limited-write / L3 sensitive-data / L4 high-impact); security assessment and AI red-team testing; identity authorization and permission control (with the under-discussed 'permission inheritance' trap); data protection; tool and protocol security; human-in-the-loop design; supply-chain security; continuous monitoring; and AI-specific incident response. Closes with five operational priorities for teams that need to start now without waiting for the 'big-and-comprehensive' regime build.

    ai-agents · ai-governance · genai
  • § 04 · AI-GOVERNANCE

    Open-Source Does Not Mean Open Data — Zhang Ping on Training-Data Compliance for Open-Source AI

    Peking University Law School professor Zhang Ping, writing in 人民论坛 (People's Tribune), takes apart two misconceptions that have dominated the Chinese open-source AI discussion: that 'open source' means training data has no copyright protection, and that 'algorithm open-source' compels 'training data publication.' Both false. Zhang lays out the structural distinction: 'open source is conditional authorization under license' — applied to model weights, not to the training corpus, which is a legally independent object. She then maps the full-chain compliance risk (acquisition / processing / output) and proposes a four-tier differentiated governance framework that finance, healthcare, and government AI deployments can actually use to map their training-data inventory against compliance gates.

    ai-governance · open-source · training-data
  • § 05 · FOREIGN-INVESTMENT-SECURITY-REVIEW

    Why China Used Foreign Investment Security Review on Manus — Not Tech or Data Export

    Hong Yanqing on Beijing's banning of Meta's Manus acquisition. The regulator's choice of pathway — Foreign Investment Security Review, not Technology or Data Export — signals a shift from 'transaction-level' to 'capability-level' oversight of frontier AI projects, with implications for any overseas tech investment touching China.

    foreign-investment-security-review · manus · ai-agent
  • § 06 · TOKENS

    Cold Water on 'Token Trading' — Wang Qinglan on the NDA's High-Quality Data Set Initiative

    In March 2026, the National Data Administration released the *Implementation Plan for Promoting High-Quality Industry Data Set Construction (Draft for Public Consultation)*, which explores a 'token (词元) based value system' and 'token trading as a new transaction mode' for high-quality data sets. The Chinese AI policy community immediately heralded the move as 'revolutionizing data trading.' Wang Qinglan pours cold water: token is a measuring unit, not a magic transformer. AI tokens are not crypto tokens. The bottleneck in China's data-element market isn't measurement — it's supply, rights clarity, compliance cost, and data silos.

    tokens · ai-training-data · data-trading
  • § 07 · FACIAL-RECOGNITION

    When Is Facial Recognition in a Public Place 'Necessary for Public Security'? Hong Yanqing's Four-Element Framework

    Hong Yanqing on how to operationalize PIPL Article 26's 'necessary for public security' principle for public-place video surveillance and facial recognition. His framework: a four-step necessity test, tiered risk regime with a published prohibited list, three-fold technical controls, and a lifecycle closure mechanism — drawing on EU AI Act and US state-level practice.

    facial-recognition · public-surveillance · pipl-article-26
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