Thousands of Companies Are Driving China’s AI Boom. A Government Registry Tracks Them All | EUROtoday
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When DeepSeek burst onto the worldwide stage in January 2025, it appeared to look out of nowhere. But the big language mannequin was simply one of many hundreds of generative AI instruments which were launched in China since 2023—and there’s a public archive of each single one in every of them.
The nation’s prime web regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), requires that any firm launching an AI instrument with “public opinion properties or social mobilization capabilities” first file it in a public database: the algorithm registry. In a submission, developers must show how their products avoid 31 categories of risk, from age and gender discrimination to psychological harm to “violating core socialist values.”
Applicants submit their filing to their local CAC (say, the Shanghai CAC for Shanghai-registered firms), which forwards applications to the central CAC for final approval. Only then is a tool publicly listed in the algorithm registry. While the European Union is pursuing a single, comprehensive AI Act, notes Matt Sheehan, a research scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, China’s approach to regulation is more ad hoc, targeting specific algorithms and building up iterative standards. (The US has no comparable registration system or centralized regulatory agency.)
Over time, the CAC has inadvertently created the most detailed map of a nation’s AI ecosystem anywhere in the world.
*Data present as of April 2025, consists of each “generative AI” and “deep synthesis” algorithms
Open the CAC’s replace from August 2024 and also you’ll discover DeepSeek listed as entry 152, a single row in a neatly packed desk. Scroll by way of the desk and also you’ll discover an AI that manages homestays and an AI that drafts patents. One assists ob-gyns in a Shanghai maternity ward; one other helps handle state energy grids. Kendra Schaefer and her colleagues at Trivium China, a Beijing-based coverage consultancy, have been compiling the CAC’s updates right into a complete database, enriched with their very own analysis.
A Broad View of the Boom
Nearly 80 p.c of China’s generative AI registrations are clustered in and round its prime tech hubs—Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. Each metropolis has its strengths: Beijing’s elite universities, nationwide labs, and political energy give it an edge in large-scale innovation; Shenzhen (in Guangdong) is dwelling to a dense {hardware} provide chain and huge pool of engineering expertise; Shanghai, near multinationals, excels at commercialization; and Hangzhou (in Zhejiang) is fueled by Alibaba’s ecommerce empire.
But innovation spreads far past the coasts. Chongqing is positioning itself as an AI manufacturing and logistics node; and heavy state funding has helped Hefei, in Anhui Province, change into generally known as “China’s speech valley” for its cluster of speech-recognition corporations, together with iFlyTek. Filings additionally originate in much less apparent areas like Guizhou, China’s “Big Data Valley,” the place huge knowledge facilities energy Huawei’s Pangu mannequin, and Inner Mongolia, the place state enterprises are integrating AI into mining and agriculture.
*Data present as of April 2025
In the Trivium dataset, state-linked listings—from state-owned enterprises to government-backed analysis institutes—make up 22 p.c of filings. Many state-linked corporations accomplice with Big Tech to construct their AI: PetroChina, for instance, teamed up with Huawei and iFlyTek to create oil and gasoline functions; State Grid used DeepSeek to construct a mannequin optimizing energy grids.
Foreign corporations make up simply 0.5 p.c of filings. Ikea, for instance, has a sensible shopper algorithm that generates product suggestions. Yum China, the father or mother firm that operates Kentucky Fried Chicken in China, listed a mannequin that generates menus and promotional materials.
Zeroing In on the Competition
*Data present as of April 2025
More than half of the listings within the algorithm registry are for what Schaefer calls cross-sector applied sciences. These vary from foundational fashions to “general purpose” textual content turbines to a big selection of multimedia instruments—voice swappers, 3D renderers, picture makers. “Nobody wants to be caught in a situation where they depend on a competitor’s technology,” Schaefer says. Unlike within the US, the place OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind dominate the market, China’s competitors to construct foundational AI stays numerous and contested. But constructing these fashions is dear, and the market is starting to consolidate. China’s six “AI tigers”—Moonshot, Minimax, Zhipu, Baichuan, 0.1AI, and Stepfun—are all backed by Alibaba or Tencent. ByteDance’s Doubao surpassed DeepSeek as China’s hottest chatbot, however its spot on the prime just isn’t assured.
Niche Natives
While the giants duke it out for chatbot supremacy, startups are arduous at work in each sector conceivable.
Squirrel AI Squirrel
Founder Derek Li says his 12-year-old firm is leaps past the ed-tech competitors. They “put wheels on a horse,” he says, bolting AI onto their present stale software program. Squirrel claims to diagnose data gaps, measure progress, and regulate classes in actual time.
When China banned for-profit tutoring in 2021, the corporate’s revenues collapsed in a single day. It pivoted to licensing its platform to franchisees who additionally offered the corporate’s AI-powered tablets. Squirrel’s community consists of greater than 3,000 facilities throughout China, serving 1.2 million college students. Now, the corporate is eyeing enlargement to the US.
Li, who withdrew his sons from a personal college in Shanghai in order that they could possibly be home-schooled on Squirrel’s platform, says that “in the future, teachers won’t teach knowledge.” Instead, he says, “they’ll become data analysts, understanding learning reports and students’ ability, and psychologists, understanding emotions and shaping their personalities.”
AI Kanshe tongue
AI Kanshe (translated as “AI Sees Tongue”) is a standard Chinese drugs startup that analyzes well being by way of photographs of the tongue, palms, and face. The firm was based by Li Wenhua, a former worker of Yaoshi Bang, one in every of China’s earliest on-line pharmaceutical platforms. A longtime scholar of tongue and hand analysis, Li needed to mix the diagnostic strategies of conventional Chinese drugs with trendy machine imaginative and prescient. The firm serves each shoppers and well being practitioners throughout clinics, pharmacies, and a few hospitals, providing instruments to help analysis and decisionmaking. Its mannequin is educated on greater than 100,000 annotated photographs of tongues, fingers, and faces.
Zhongtan Puhui Cloud Technology Zhongtan Puhui Cloud Technology
Founded in 2024 by Wu Song, a former Wall Street quant dealer, Zhongtan Puhui Cloud Technology develops AI-driven instruments for carbon accounting. The inexperienced transition, Wu says, nonetheless depends on cumbersome human labor that could possibly be automated.
Zhongtan Puhui builds AI brokers that deal with plenty of carbon accounting duties, together with carbon footprinting and emissions audits. Its purchasers vary from China Minmetals Group and DHL to small and medium-sized exporters within the Yangtze River Delta.
https://www.wired.com/story/china-ai-boom-algorithm-registry/