By Hamza Faisal
China is moving to put artificial intelligence under a single, comprehensive law. The country's top economic planner said on November 3 that it will speed up work on a basic AI law covering the full lifecycle of the technology, from the data and computing power that train models to the way they are deployed and used.
The announcement came from Wang Ruomeng, a deputy director-general at the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), at a briefing in Beijing — the first in a series of press briefings on the goals of China's 15th Five-Year Plan, which runs from 2026 to 2030. Bloomberg first reported the remarks, which were confirmed in the NDRC's own transcript of the briefing.
What the law would cover
According to Wang, Beijing will legislate on the building blocks of AI — data, computing power and algorithms — and set safety standards and ethical guidelines spanning the full lifecycle, from research and development through deployment and use. The law is intended to be the basic, comprehensive statute that underpins all other AI regulation in the country.
Developers and operators would face new duties: strengthening risk management, disclosing safety risks promptly, and proactively reporting safety incidents and vulnerability information. The plan also includes sector-by-sector regulatory sandboxes and transition periods to ease compliance, plus monitoring of AI-driven job displacement.
DeepSeek, Moonshot and Alibaba in scope
Bloomberg reported that the rules would reach China's leading domestic developers, including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI and Alibaba Group. DeepSeek became globally prominent for its efficient, openly shared models, Moonshot is known for its Kimi models and long-context work, and Alibaba's Qwen models are among the most widely used open-weight systems in the world.
Wang said regulators will set reasonable transition periods, offer compliance guidance by sector, and build evaluation, consulting and certification services to cut firms' compliance costs — a signal that Beijing wants the rules to land without choking the developers it is also trying to promote.
A law years in the making
The announcement builds on several years of groundwork. China already adopted measures governing public-facing generative AI services in 2023, and comprehensive AI legislation was added to the State Council's legislative work plan in May 2026. In September 2026, the national cybersecurity standards committee TC260 released the third version of its AI Safety Governance Framework, though that document is advisory rather than binding.
No enactment date, penalty structure or detailed compliance checklist has been published, and the obligations for individual companies are still to be defined. The announcement follows a China-US AI agreement reached in September and AI discussions at the recent Trump-Xi summit, and it arrives as governments everywhere wrestle with the same question: how to keep increasingly powerful AI under meaningful control without stopping useful work altogether.
By Hamza Faisal
