China debates AI agent rules
China’s policy discussions have shifted from scaling AI to governing ‘autonomous agents,’ and regulators including the PBOC are pushing for ‘safe and orderly’ AI use in finance, per Forbes and Regulation Asia argued reported. That regulatory pivot means audits, interpretability, and governance features are becoming hard requirements for fintech deployments.
The National People’s Congress submitted a work report on March 9 that announced) stepped‑up legislative research on artificial intelligence as a 2026 priority. The China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) launched) a testing and evaluation program for “trusted internet intelligent agents” that defines 16 indicators and more than 70 sub‑items for agent trustworthiness. Government agencies and state‑owned enterprises — including some of China’s largest banks — were circulated internal memos this week instructing staff not to install OpenClaw on office devices, according to reports from Bloomberg reported) and Reuters said). SecurityScorecard’s scans identified roughly 40,214 publicly exposed OpenClaw instances and warned many were misconfigured and vulnerable to takeover, a finding picked up by Infosecurity and CGTN reported). Shenzhen’s Longgang district published a March 7 draft “Lobster Ten Measures” offering subsidies of up to 2 million yuan (≈$290,000) and equity support up to 10 million yuan for OpenClaw‑related projects, the South China Morning Post noted). CAICT said it will begin trialing agent trustworthiness standards in late March while the National Computer Network Emergency Response Team (CNCERT) issued a formal OpenClaw security advisory on March 10, setting near‑term testing and remediation timelines for deployed agents reported). PBoC deputy governor Lu Lei framed the financial‑sector dimension of the push under an “AI + Finance” blueprint at Hong Kong FinTech Week on November 3–4, 2025, linking model governance to broader financial structural reform, as covered by the Asian Banker and PBoC press materials reported).
