China’s Public AI Registry: The Unintended Complete Map of China’s Booming AI Ecosystem

When DeepSeek launched globally in January 2025, it caught most outside observers off guard, appearing to emerge from thin air. But this high-profile large language model is far from an anomaly: it is just one of thousands of generative AI tools released in China since 2023 — and every single one of these tools is documented in a public, official government archive.

China’s top internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), mandates that any company releasing an AI tool with “public opinion influence or social mobilization capacity” must first register the product in a centralized public database called the national algorithm registry. As part of their submission, developers must prove their systems mitigate 31 distinct categories of risk, ranging from age and gender bias and psychological harm to content that “violates core socialist values.”

Applications are first filed with a company’s local CAC branch — for example, Shanghai-registered firms submit to the Shanghai CAC — which then passes materials along to the central CAC for final approval. Only after approval is a tool added to the public algorithm registry. Matt Sheehan, a research scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, points out that while the European Union has moved forward with a single, overarching AI Act, China’s regulatory framework is more incremental and targeted, building out iterative standards by focusing on specific algorithm types. Unlike the EU, the United States has no equivalent national registration system or centralized AI regulatory agency at all.

Over time, this mandatory registration system has accidentally produced the most comprehensive, detailed map of any national AI ecosystem on the planet.

Open the CAC’s August 2024 registry update, and you’ll find DeepSeek listed as entry 152, a single line in a clean, organized table. Scroll further, and you’ll find everything from an AI that manages homestay bookings to one that drafts patent applications. One tool assists obstetricians at a Shanghai maternity hospital; another optimizes operations for national power grids. Kendra Schaefer and her team at Trivium China, a Beijing-based policy consultancy, have aggregated all of the CAC’s regular updates into a single, comprehensive dataset, augmented with their own independent research.

A Broad View of the AI Boom

Nearly 80% of all generative AI registrations in China are concentrated in and around the country’s leading tech hubs: Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Hangzhou. Each hub has carved out its own unique strengths: Beijing’s top-tier universities, national research labs, and proximity to policymakers give it an edge in large, groundbreaking innovation; Shenzhen (in Guangdong province) boasts a dense, world-class hardware supply chain and a massive pool of skilled engineering talent; Shanghai, with its deep connections to multinational corporations, excels at commercializing new AI tools; and Hangzhou (in Zhejiang province) is powered by the sprawling e-commerce empire of Alibaba.

But AI innovation stretches far beyond China’s wealthy coastal regions. Chongqing is positioning itself as a national hub for AI-powered manufacturing and logistics; heavy state investment has turned Hefei, the capital of Anhui province, into “China’s Speech Valley,” home to a cluster of leading speech recognition firms including industry giant iFlyTek. Registrations also come from less expected regions: Guizhou, China’s official “Big Data Valley,” hosts massive data centers that power Huawei’s Pangu large model, while Inner Mongolia’s state-owned enterprises are integrating AI into mining and agricultural operations.

In the Trivium dataset, state-affiliated entities — ranging from state-owned enterprises to government-backed research institutes — account for 22% of all filings. Many state-linked players partner with China’s big tech firms to build custom AI tools: PetroChina, for example, collaborated with Huawei and iFlyTek to develop AI applications for oil and gas exploration and operations; the State Grid of China worked with DeepSeek to build a custom model that optimizes power grid distribution.

Foreign companies account for just 0.5% of all registered AI tools. Ikea, for instance, has registered a smart shopper algorithm that generates personalized product recommendations for customers. Yum China, the parent company that operates KFC across the country, has registered an AI model that generates custom menus and promotional marketing content.

Zeroing In on the Competition

More than half of all listings in the algorithm registry fall into what Schaefer categorizes as cross-sector technologies. This group includes everything from foundational large language models to general-purpose text generators and a wide range of multimedia tools, from voice changers to 3D renderers to AI image generators. “Nobody wants to end up dependent on a competitor’s core technology,” Schaefer explains. Unlike the U.S. market, where OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind hold dominant market share, China’s race to build foundational AI remains diverse and highly competitive. But building large foundational models comes with enormous costs, and the market is already starting to consolidate. China’s six leading “AI tigers” — Moonshot, Minimax, Zhipu, Baichuan, 0.1AI, and Stepfun — are all backed by Chinese tech giants Alibaba or Tencent. ByteDance’s Doubao chatbot recently overtook DeepSeek as the most popular consumer chatbot in China, but its position at the top is far from guaranteed.

While big tech giants battle for consumer chatbot supremacy, startups are building AI tools for nearly every sector you can imagine.

Derek Li, founder of edtech firm Squirrel, says his 12-year-old company has pulled far ahead of its competitors in the AI edtech space. The company “put wheels on a horse,” as Li puts it, by adding cutting-edge AI to its older, existing educational software. Squirrel’s AI claims to identify individual students’ knowledge gaps, track learning progress, and adjust lesson plans in real time to match each student’s pace.

When China banned for-profit private tutoring in 2021, the company’s revenue collapsed overnight. It pivoted to licensing its platform to franchisees, who also sell the company’s AI-powered learning tablets. Today, Squirrel’s network includes more than 3,000 learning centers across China, serving 1.2 million students. Now the company is targeting expansion into the U.S. market.

Li, who pulled his own sons out of a private Shanghai school to homeschool them using Squirrel’s platform, argues that “in the future, teachers won’t be in the business of teaching knowledge.” Instead, he says, “they’ll become data analysts, who interpret learning reports and understand each student’s strengths, and psychologists, who support students’ emotional wellbeing and shape their character.”

AI Kanshe, which translates to “AI Sees Tongue,” is a traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) startup that uses AI to assess patient health from images of the tongue, palms, and face. The company was founded by Li Wenhua, a former employee of Yaoshi Bang, one of China’s first online pharmaceutical platforms. A long-time student of TCM tongue and hand diagnosis, Li set out to combine traditional TCM diagnostic methods with modern computer vision technology. Today, the company serves both consumers and healthcare providers across clinics, pharmacies, and a number of hospitals, offering tools to support clinical diagnosis and treatment decision-making. Its AI model is trained on more than 100,000 annotated images of tongues, hands, and faces from patients.

Founded in 2024 by Wu Song, a former quantitative trader on Wall Street, Zhongtan Puhui Cloud Technology develops AI-powered tools for carbon accounting. Wu notes that the global green transition still relies on clunky, labor-intensive manual processes that could easily be automated.

Zhongtan Puhui builds AI agents that handle a full range of carbon accounting tasks, including calculating product carbon footprints and conducting emissions audits. Its clients range from large state-owned firms like China Minmetals Group and logistics giant DHL to small and medium-sized exporters across the Yangtze River Delta.

According to the company, its AI agents can pull real-time emissions data directly from power plants, allowing them to complete a project that once took up to 30 days in just 15 minutes — at one-tenth of the original cost.

Zhongtan Puhui is planning to expand into European markets. It recently added English, French, Portuguese, and German language versions of its platform, and plans to offer its product through Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.

After seeing Honda’s Asimo humanoid robot at a tech fair in Japan, Zhou Jian founded UBtech in 2012. He spent six years refining the robot’s servo actuators — the moving “joints” that enable flexible, stable movement — before launching the company’s first consumer humanoid robot, Alpha. In 2023, UBtech became the first humanoid robotics company to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Headquartered in Shenzhen, the company now produces robots for factories, schools, healthcare facilities, and private homes. Its flagship Walker S series, built for industrial and logistics work, is used by automakers including BYD and Zeekr; its Jimu and uKIT robotics kits teach K-12 students coding and AI basics; its child-friendly Alpha Mini humanoid robot is used in nursery schools across Seoul. The company also develops robots for elder care and companionship, as well as consumer devices like smart vacuums and robotic lawn mowers.

UBtech retrains off-the-shelf foundational models first in simulated environments, then in test factory settings, before deploying them on real production lines. The company currently sells its products to more than 40 countries, with roughly one-third of its total revenue coming from overseas markets.

XVerse builds immersive, lifelike virtual worlds for entertainment. The company was founded by Yao Xing, a former vice president at Tencent. After leading Tencent’s development of a world-class Go-playing AI, Yao concluded that AGI development progresses fastest when its goals are clear and measurable — as they are in the game of Go — but most real-world challenges are open-ended and unstructured. So in 2020, he left Tencent to found XVerse, with the goal of building complex, simulated virtual worlds where AI can learn, act, and evolve on its own.

In 2024, the company launched its flagship product, Saylo, which turns ordinary chat conversations into immersive, AI-generated story videos. Users can create custom virtual characters and explore branching, interactive storylines in real time. The app already has 20 million users worldwide. The company has also built its own large language model, XVerse MoE, trained on a diverse range of data including news, code, literature, and academic research papers.

XVerse is also developing an AI-driven open-world game called Zhaoyang Legend, set in a fantasy realm where players take on the role of a young crown prince vying for the throne and governing their kingdom. The game evolves dynamically based on every player’s choices, creating an endless array of possible storylines and endings.

BubblePal, a golf-ball sized smart device, turns ordinary children’s stuffed toys into conversational AI companions. Clip it onto a stuffed Peppa Pig, and the toy will talk back in Peppa’s iconic voice. The device can switch between more than 40 different character personalities, from Disney’s Buzz Lightyear to the Monkey King, and supports multiple languages and dialects including French, German, Cantonese, and Sichuanese. A companion mobile app lets parents set learning goals — such as encouraging more English conversation practice — and tracks weekly “growth reports” that analyze a child’s conversation topics, emotional state, and personal interests. Since its launch in summer 2024, more than 300,000 units have been sold.

BubblePal is made by Haivivi, a Chinese startup founded in 2021 by Li Yong, a former Alibaba executive who helped develop the company’s line of smart speakers. After noticing that a large share of smart speaker users were children, Li decided to focus on making AI-powered children’s toys, and pivoted the company to AI companions in 2023. He relocated the company from Beijing to Shenzhen to take advantage of the city’s dense, efficient consumer electronics supply chain.

According to the company, its AI models go through strict data reviews and content monitoring to block inappropriate speech. In addition to passing the CAC’s rigorous algorithm registry vetting process, it follows all of the CAC’s rules for protecting minors’ personal data. BubblePal is already available in the U.S., Canada, and the UK, with plans for further global expansion. Haivivi plans to add more popular licensed characters like Lucky Cat and develop new product lines for young adults, such as AI-powered tarot reading tools.

What the Registry Doesn’t Show: Chinese AI Is Already Going Global

In recent years, the term chuhai — meaning “go out to sea,” or expand overseas — has become a major buzzword among Chinese AI firms, which are looking abroad to escape slowing domestic consumption and weak domestic capital markets. China produces roughly one-quarter of the world’s top 100 AI products by revenue, and most of these products target overseas consumers and businesses. For example, the top revenue earner for Hangzhou-based Glority is a plant-identification app called PictureThis, which is far more popular outside China than it is domestically.

To avoid geopolitical risks, some Chinese AI companies have deliberately distanced themselves from their Chinese origins by hiring mostly foreign staff, setting up official headquarters in Singapore or California, or relocating their entire operations outside of China. One example is Butterfly Effect, a company that was originally founded in China and built a popular general-purpose AI agent called Manus. Shortly after the U.S. imposed new export controls on advanced Nvidia chips, the company relocated its headquarters to Singapore, laid off most of its Chinese staff, and removed all traces of its content from Chinese social media platforms.

Butterfly Effect’s ambiguous corporate identity raises a deeper question: What exactly does it mean to be a “Chinese” AI company, anyway?

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