Thousands of Companies Are Driving China’s AI Boom. A Government Registry Tracks Them All

When DeepSeek burst onto the global stage in January 2025, it seemed to appear out of nowhere. But the large language model was just one of the thousands of generative AI tools that have been released in China since 2023—and there’s a public archive of every single one of them.

The country’s top internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), requires that any company launching an AI tool 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 ...