China's premier information technology academy joined leading technology conglomerates including Huawei, Alibaba, Tencent, and Xiaomi on Wednesday to launch a self-regulatory convention aimed at setting national standards for artificial intelligence agents and autonomous digital systems.
The "Self-Discipline Convention on AI Agent Development" was officially released during the 2026 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit by 20 founding organizations, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), a research institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.
The initiative outlines eight core self-regulatory measures designed to guide the domestic AI industry:
Trust Systems: Establishing robust verification and trust mechanisms for autonomous AI agents.
Interconnection Infrastructure: Constructing shared digital infrastructure to connect disparate AI agent networks.
Interoperability Standards: Enhancing cross-platform compatibility and operational seamlessness among different developer systems.
Security Defenses: Upgrading cybersecurity protocols and technical safeguards against system vulnerabilities and malicious exploits.
Governance Frameworks: Refining internal oversight and operational management mechanisms for autonomous algorithms.
User Protection: Safeguarding individual data privacy and consumer rights in multi-agent environments.
Industrial Integration: Accelerating the deployment of AI agents across traditional manufacturing and commercial sectors.
Inclusive Access: Promoting equitable access to baseline AI agent technologies and open developer ecosystems.
Under the framework, the founding tech companies committed to taking the lead in implementing the self-discipline pledges and subjecting their autonomous agent development pipelines to oversight by industry associations and the public.
The convention comes as major Chinese technology firms shift their generative AI strategies toward autonomous agents—software entities capable of executing multi-step tasks, invoking external tools, and orchestrating complex enterprise workflows independently.
