China was the first major country to have a rule dedicated to generative AI — and keeps expanding it piece by piece, the most recent one aimed at a product type the original law never anticipated: AI companions with personality.
The Interim Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services were jointly issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) and six other ministries on July 13, 2023, effective August 15, 2023. They established the base framework still in force today: any service with “public opinion attributes” or “social mobilization capabilities” — in practice, almost any chatbot or image generator with a public audience — must pass a security assessment and register its algorithm with the CAC before launch.
On April 10, 2026, the CAC and four other departments issued the Interim Measures for the Administration of Anthropomorphic AI Interaction Services — a rule specifically dedicated to AI products designed to simulate personality, companionship, or emotional relationship with the user. It's a direct response to the growth of “AI companions” and assistants with strong personalities, a product category the 2023 measures didn't explicitly distinguish from generative AI in general.
Unlike the EU AI Act, which classifies systems by abstract risk level (minimal, limited, high, unacceptable), China's approach tends to issue specific rules for concrete product categories as they gain scale — first generative AI in general, then anthropomorphic AI. It's a reactive but fast regulatory pattern: identify a product category with specific growth and risk, and legislate directly on it.
Any generative AI product — and now, in particular, any product with a “companion”-style personality or interaction — targeting the Chinese market needs to map which specific measure applies to it, not assume a single horizontal rule covers everything. The pace of new category-specific measures is high, so actively monitoring the CAC's site is, in practice, part of ongoing compliance work, not a one-time review.
Carlos Montiel is an enterprise AI solutions architect. He implements LLMs, Agents, RAG, and orchestrators for companies across Guatemala and Latin America. Reach out for a consultation.
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