Making Money in Chinese AI Safety

Compliance-as-a-Service

This post originally appeared in ChinaTalk.

“A student startup building its first AI product faces the same regulatory requirements as Alibaba.”

If you want to publicly launch an AI product in China, you need to get on the government’s safety list. You can see all 6,000+ approved companies in plain sight (courtesy of Trivium: excel file). But what’s less clear is how to actually get registered. Some vendors claim they’ll do it for you. Others claim they can do much more.

Let’s take a closer look at the emerging marketplace for AI safety services in China.

We’ll begin with the cottage industry of online vendors promising to help companies navigate the filing process, then turn to the more formal third-party safety firms positioning safety as a full-fledged business model. Finally, we’ll examine how the West tends to frame safety and technological progress as opposing forces, a tension far less pronounced in China, before turning to what the rise of agentic AI could mean for the scale of China’s safety industry.

For Context

Any company deploying generative AI services with “public opinion attributes or social mobilization capabilities” has to file with the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC). Before you scale to the public, regulators need to be satisfied that your model won’t say the wrong things or “violate core socialist values.” You have to make sure your model won’t claim Taiwan is an independent country or explain what happened in 1989 in Tiananmen Square.