On August 15, 2023, the Interim Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services (Measures) – China’s first binding regulation on generative AI – came into force. The Interim Measures were jointly issued by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), along with six other agencies, on July 10, 2023, following a public consultation on an earlier draft of the Measures that concluded in May 2023.

This blog post is a follow-up to an earlier guest blog post, “Unveiling China’s Generative AI Regulation” published by the Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) on June 23, 2023, that analyzed the earlier draft of the Measures. This post compares the final version of the regulation with the earlier draft version and highlights key provisions.

Notable changes in the final version of the Measures include:

A shift in institutional dynamics, with the CAC playing a less prominent role;
Clarification of the Measures’ applicability and scope;
Introduction of responsibilities for users;
Introduction of additional responsibilities for providers, such as taking effective measures to improve the quality of training data, signing service agreements with registered users, and promptly addressing illegal content;
Assignment of responsibilities to government agencies to strengthen the management of generative AI services; and
Introduction of a transparency requirement for generative AI services, in addition to the existing responsibilities for providers to increase the accuracy and reliability of generated content.

Published by the Future of Privacy Forum blog. The blog post builds on insights developed in the context of Guarini Global Law & Tech’s conference on “how (not) to regulate generative AI”.

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The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) released Draft Measures for the Management of Generative AI Services (the “Draft Measures”) on April 11, 2023. The comment period closed on May 10, 2023. Public statements by industry participants and legal experts provided insight into the likely content of their comments. It is now the turn of the CAC as China’s “cyber super-regulator” to consider these comments and likely produce a revised text.

This blog post analyzes the provisions and implications of the Draft Measures. It covers the Draft Measures’ scope of application, how they apply to the development and deployment lifecycle of generative AI systems, and how they deal with the ability of generative AI systems to “hallucinate” (that is, produce inaccurate or baseless output). It also highlights potential developments and contextual points about the Draft Measures that industry and observers should pay attention to.

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